iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
The BBC has an article on Coronavirus: Why are there doubts over contact-tracing apps? It says: But critics warn this kind of system would be imprecise since some phones detect signals from up to 30m (98ft) away without being able to determine the distance. The BBC took this from information in a Wired article that … Continue reading “Bluetooth Detection Range”
Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph, Canada, have a new paper on Smart Parking System Based on Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons with Particle Filtering (pdf). The system uses an Android app and Gimbal Series 21 beacons advertising Eddystone. The server side uses an RSSI path loss model, based on Bayesian … Continue reading “Parking System Using Beacons”
Researchers at the Pusan National University, Korea have a new paper on Applying Movement Constraints to BLE RSSI-Based Indoor Positioning for Extracting Valid Semantic Trajectories. The received signal strength (RSSI) of beacons is often used to infer location. However, the RSSI is subject to reflection and blocking from walls, people and other obstacles causing the … Continue reading “Movement Constraint-based Location Tracking”
Nordic, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) in most beacons, has a new blog post on Five Things You Didn’t Know About Nordic’s Mobile Development Apps. The post mentions less visible features of nRF Connect on iOS and Android. For example, you can get a useful RSSI graph by dragging the screen … Continue reading “nRF Connect Features”
There’s novel recent research on City Marathon Active Timing System Using Bluetooth Low Energy Technology by Chun-I Sun, Jung-Tang Huang, Shih-Chi Weng and Meng-Fan Chien of Taiwan. The authors discuss the use of beacons vs RFID and create a system using Received Signal Strength Indicator RSSI and gateways connected to detector mats: Beacons are carried … Continue reading “Using Beacons for Race Timing”
Bluetooth Framework is a library for using Bluetooth on Windows. There are editions for .NET, c++ and VCL. While the framework has many features, those of particular interest to Bluetooth LE developers are: Enumerating and managing local Bluetooth radios Searching for remote Bluetooth enabled devices Measuring RSSI Bluetooth LE (BLE) GATT profile client Monitor Bluetooth … Continue reading “Windows Bluetooth Framework”
There’s a useful recent research paper by Basem AL-Madani, Farid Orujov, Rytis Maskeliūnas, Robertas Damaševičius,and Algimantas Venčkauskas on Fuzzy Logic Type-2 Based Wireless Indoor Localization System for Navigation of Visually Impaired People in Buildings. The paper explores indoor location algorithms and implements a fingerprinting system using RSSI that achieves an average error of 0.43m. The … Continue reading “Beacon Based Navigation for the Visually Impaired”
There’s new research by Umair Mujtaba Qureshi, Zuneera Umair and Gerhard Petrus Hancke of the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong on Evaluating the Implications of Varying Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Transmission Power Levels on Wireless Indoor Localization Accuracy and Precision. The paper takes a deep look into the relationship between transmitted … Continue reading “The Affect of Power Levels on Wireless Indoor Localisation Accuracy”
While we wait for commercial Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding solutions to become available, people are trying to refine traditional locating methods to gain more accuracy. Baichuan Huang, Jingbin Liu, Wei Sun and Fan Yang have a research paper on A Robust Indoor Positioning Method based on Bluetooth Low Energy with Separate Channel Information. They have … Continue reading “Bluetooth Positioning Using Separate Bluetooth Channels”
We sometimes get asked for location beacons or which beacons are best for determining location. All beacons can be used for locating. While there are physical aspects such as battery size/life and waterproofing that make some beacons more suitable for some scenarios, locating capability is determined more by the software used rather than the beacons … Continue reading “Location Beacons”