iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
We now have the INGICS iGS02E Bluetooth to Ethernet gateway (without PoE) in stock.
This small device looks for Bluetooth LE devices and sends their advertising on to a server via TCP, HTTP(S) or MQTT including AWS IoT. If you use with sensor beacons, this provides a quick and easy way to provide for IoT sensing.
Compatible with BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™.
We also stock the INGICS PoE splitter.
We have some early samples of the new INGICS iBS03 range of beacons in stock. They are functionally similar to the iBS01 range except are waterproof to IP67 and have a more robust case with 2m drop protection.
We stock three variants:
iBS03T – Temperature sensor
iBS03G – Motion (starting/moving/stopped) and fall detection
iBS03RG – Accelerometer for raw xyz
We have the new ABSensor N03 in stock, a sensor beacon advertising temperature, humidity and light level.
This beacon has excellent mounting options including a magnet on back, undrilled holes on back, mount holes on side flanges and an included sticker:
We have the new Minew S1 in stock. It’s a sensor beacon with accelerometer, temperature and humidity as well as iBeacon/Eddystone. Unusually for a temperature/humidity beacon it is waterproof to IP65 making it suitable for use outdoors. Sensor beacons like this usually have the sensor on the PCB and a hole in the case to pass through ambient temperature and humidity. Instead, the sensor is outside the beacon:
This beacon takes 2 AAA batteries and uses a newer, more efficient Nordic nRF52 System on a Chip (SoC) for a long 3 year battery life.
There’s a useful new post on the Nordic blog on Partnerships & Ecosystems for Industrial IoT. Nordic is the manufacturer of the System-on-a Chip (SoC) in most beacons and Lorenzo is one of their Business Development Managers.
The blog post makes the case for companies not to try to go it alone. The newness and complexity of technologies is such that it’s unlikely you have the skills in-house. What’s more, you
“won’t know what you don’t know”
We have found that it’s often the case with organisations taking up our consultancy, that they ask particular questions when their real problems are somewhere else. They are oblivious to the unknown unknowns.
Another common situation we come across is companies setting off in the wrong direction, doing lots of work and realising it doesn’t work. They contact us for quick fix but sometimes one doesn’t exist. Once you get in deep, it can be hard to pull out and even when things partially work you can end up with long term problems due to poor initial decisions.
The Nordic blog post advocates finding partners. One thing we have found is not to partner with anyone and everyone, at any cost. Only partner when there’s a clear synergy. Be clear whether you really will be a partner or customer. Although there can be some overlap, some unscrupulous companies use partnership as a guise for selling.
ABI Research predicts that there’s going to be an increase in beacon-enabled app shipments mainly due to retail and ambient intelligence:
So what is ambient intelligence? It’s a catch all term for the joining of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, the connected home, wearables, smartphones, voice/image recognition and artificial intelligence through machine learning.
Sensor beacons enable the gathering of new data. New data not only measures physical things but, more importantly, provides a way of circumventing the problem of silo data in many large organisations. Silo data is data people/departments don’t want to share for fear of losing power or control. Today’s machine learning techniques also require data to be in a specific format and ‘clean’. Creating new data allows it to be more readily formatted and conditioned prior to saving.
This isn’t just about location data. It includes physical quantities such as smaller-scale movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate and fall detection. Our conversations with beacon manufacturers tell us beacons are currently being developed that detect more nuanced quantities such as colour, gas and UV. Some beacons already have general purpose input/output (GPIO) such that custom beacons can can already detect anything for which there’s an electronic sensor.
So why Bluetooth beacons rather than other electronics with the same sensors? Here are the main reasons:
There’s an article in The Manufacturer magazine on “Manufacturing:the numbers” that highlights some numbers from the Hennik Research’s Annual Manufacturing Report.
In practice, we are finding many organisations are struggling to develop skills, business processes and organisational willpower to implement 4IR. There’s a relatively slow pace in many industries, driven down by the uncertainties of Brexit, Europe and International trading tensions.
Nevertheless, we believe that once these political issues start to play out, the more forward-thinking manufacturers will realise they have to revolutionise their processes in order to compete in an market with complex labour availability and tighter margins due to tariffs. Manufacturers that are able to harness 4IR effectively will be the ones that will be able to differentiate themselves, while the laggards will find themselves more and more at a disadvantage.
Read about Sensing for Industry and IoT
Read about Machine Learning
There’s a type of beacon that doesn’t send out iBeacon or Eddystone advertising. Instead, it sends out standard Bluetooth 4.0 advertising containing sensor values. This means the data can be picked up via apps, gateways, Raspberry Pis or other devices that can see Bluetooth advertising.
An example of this is the INGICS iBS01 range of beacons.
The round bit in the middle is a button that can be pressed. Here’s an example for the data from the iBS01T temperature/humidity sensor:
Additionally, the ‘event’ data gives the state of the button press.
Bluetooth sensor tags and sensor beacons are essentially the same thing. The terminology of tags vs beacons stems from how they are used. If the devices are fixed, they tend to be called beacons and if they are placed on assets or people they tend to be called tags because they are tagging things and people. However, the terminology is interchangeable, irrespective of the use.
The use of the term tags also comes from the use in RFID, barcode and UWB devices that can also be used to uniquely identify devices.
Bluetooth sensors can be used in two ways, either via connection-less advertising or having another Bluetooth device connect and examine values. This is explained further in our article on Using Bluetooth Wireless Sensors.
Tagging implies locating. However unlike other technologies, devices can do a lot more than just locating and can detect movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate and fall detection.
Read more about:
Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)
Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)
For a while now, we have had enquiries from companies interested in our BeaconRTLS but not wanting the whole thing. In some scenarios such as IoT, machine learning and even locating you just want to collect data and not visualise it on maps/plans. Also, our BeaconRTLS™ was found to be overkill for small scale projects that don’t need the extremely high throughput.
Today, we have released BeaconServer™. It’s a ready-made system to collect multi-location beacon advertising data and make it available to other people, systems and apps. It allows you to collect, save and query beacon data without any coding.
BeaconServer™ comes in the form of a self install. Please see the BeaconServer web site for more information.