iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
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”
Beacons are great for use with robots for use in determining extra contextual information. There’s recent research on Autonomous Navigation of an Indoor Mecanum-Wheeled Omnidirectional Robot Using Segnet (pdf) that uses iBeacons to determine a rough location of the robot. The locating uses Kalman filtering and trilateration to get a fix for the robot. If … Continue reading “Using iBeacons for Locating Robots”
There’s a research paper by Thomas Tegou, Ilias Kalamaras, Markos Tsipouras, Nikolaos Giannakeas, Kostantinos Votis and Dimitrios Tzovaras of Information Technologies Institute, Greece on A Low-Cost Indoor Activity Monitoring System for Detecting Frailty in Older Adults. The paper describes a room-level accuracy indoor localization system, based on Bluetooth RSSI, to assess the frailty in older … Continue reading “Using iBeacon to Assess Elderly Frailty”
Connected factory implementations require a large number of connected assets for condition-based monitoring, asset tracking, inventory (stock) management or for building automation. Bluetooth is a secure, low cost, low power and reliable solution suitable for use in connected factories. In this post, we examine the reasoning behind some out-of-date thinking on industrial wireless, uncover the … Continue reading “Bluetooth LE on the Factory Floor”