Category: Beacons

Beacon Settings Retention When There’s a Loss of Power

A beacon has many settings such as the mode (iBeacon, Eddystone), transmission (ids or URL), power and advertising period. These settings are set via the manufacture app. However, what happens if the beacon is switched off via a button on the side of the button? What happens if the battery is removed? What happens to the settings?

First of all, if you turn off a beacon via a side switch beacons don’t power down but instead go into a very low power sleep mode.

All beacons have a portion of non-volatile flash memory that can be used to save values even when the power is removed by taking out the battery or removing from a USB slot. This means for almost all beacons, removing the power doesn’t cause the beacon to lose its settings. We say ‘almost all’ because we have found one exception to be Sky beacons that while they retain settings when the side switch is pressed on/off, they don’t retain settings if the battery is removed. This is because the firmware (code) in the beacon isn’t saving settings to non-volatile memory.

One thing to be aware of is that the non-volatile memory can only be updated so many times before it stops working. The number of times is very large and isn’t of consequence unless you have your own app that is frequently programatically changing settings. However, for some specialist beacons, for example mesh beacons, internally saved data can and will change more often thus introducing the possibly that beacons can become ‘worn out’ if the software isn’t designed to reduce the frequency of changed saved data.

Indianapolis Colts Lose First Round In Battle Over Beacon ‘Eavesdropping’ App

There’s an article on DigitalNewsDaily about the Indianapolis Colts where a federal judge has ruled that the basketball team must face a lawsuit alleging that the team’s mobile app eavesdropped on fans.

“The app activates phones’ microphones in order to listen to Lisnr’s beacons”

To be clear, these aren’t Bluetooth beacons. Instead, Lisnr uses beacons emitting audio to trigger events in an app:

“LISNR is an ultrasonic audio technology — a communication protocol that uses inaudible sound, called Smart Tones™, to transmit information.”

Unlike with Bluetooth beacons, this necessarily uses the smartphones’ microphone to detect the audio beacons. Had the Colts used Bluetooth Beacons, there would have been no issue over whether microphone listening was being used for nefarious purposes.

Motorola Radios and iBeacons

Motorola manufacture the MOTOTRBO range of digital radios that can detect iBeacons.

Used together with the TRBOnet PLUS (pdf) control room software, the location of people with digital radios can be plotted onto maps:

Supported handsets currently include:

  • MOTOTRBO DP4000e Series
  • MOTOTRBO SL4000e Series
  • MOTOTRBO DP3441e
  • MOTOTRBO DP3661e

Motorola handsets work with any iBeacons. We recently supplied beacons to a power station for lone worker monitoring using TRBOnet PLUS. Buy from our wide range of iBeacons.

Are you an established 2-way radio company?
Contact us for advice on which beacons we have supplied for use with TRBOnet.

Improving on Beacon Immediate, Near and Far

We recently highlighted an article on Beacon Trajectory Smoothing. Faheem Zafari, Ioannis Papapanagiotou, Michael Devetsikiotis and Thomas Hacker have a new paper on An iBeacon based Proximity and Indoor Localization System (pdf) that also uses filtering.

They use a Server-Side Running Average (SRA) and Server-Side Kalman Filter (SKF) to improve the proximity detection accuracy compared to Apple’s immediate, near and far indicators.

The researchers found:

The current (Apple) approach achieved a proximity detection accuracy of 65.83% and 67.5% in environment 1 and environment 2 respectively. SRA achieved 92.5% and 96.6% proximity detection accuracy which is 26.7% and 29.1% improvement over the current approach in environment 1 and 2 respectively

What’s interesting here is that the researchers have quantified the accuracy of Apple’s implementation in two scenarios. The accuracy isn’t that good and as the researchers have shown, can be improved upon significantly.

Thoughts on the Interview with CEO of Gimbal

The site for the forthcoming The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Beacosystem book has a new video interview with Jeff Russakow, CEO of Gimbal. Here are some insights from the interview.

Most beacon projects need an app. Gimbal is partnering with companies such as Shazam to get Beacon detection working on larger numbers of phones and then convincing those users to install a more specific app for a for more immersive experience. This made us wonder whether Eddystone-URL/the Physical Web could also provide this function. Could Eddystone URL be used to convince the user to install a specific app for a for more immersive experience?

Jeff talks of providing experiences rather than coupons. Experience is not a coupon. It’s important to know your customer (through context, including via beacons), before pushing coupons.

The video mentions some interesting usecases for banks. There are also a large range of things that can be done automatically for users when they reach a location. Beacons can also be used to provide analytics. Not analytics about triggered coupons or experiences but web analytics for the physical world. Simply knowing where people are and what they are doing can aid other business processes.

The conclusion is that beacon technology is relatively mature but under-commercialised. It offers new, varied opportunities, especially outside the marketing world. We agree with Jeff’s view is that industry could do with more thought leadership.

BeaconZone Mentioned in SD Times Article

sdtimesThe SD Times has a new article, by Alexandra Weber Morales on Why developers are sitting pretty for IoT.

The article explains how mobile developers such as ourselves are moving to the IoT and how beacons are part of the IoT. Other important areas for IoT are (big) data and security. The article concludes with several ways to get started and explore the IoT.

You might also like to read an article on Beacons and IoT that we wrote on LinkedIn last January.

iB004 PLUS Sensor Beacon Available

We now have a limited number of iB004 PLUS beacons in stock with an additional SHT20 temperature/humidity sensor. The iB004 is one of the most commonly used (and re-branded) beacons and the ‘PLUS’ part means it has a larger CR2477 battery rather than the CR2450 in the original iB004. The larger battery means there’s a longer 100m (vs 70m) range and longer battery life.

ib004plus-temp_smaller

The temperature/humidity version has a small hole in the top to allow the environment, external to the case, to be sensed.