Nordic Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) used in many beacons, has published the latest online issue of Wireless Quarter Magazine. It showcases the many uses of Nordic SoCs.
The pandemic has increased the use of Nordic Semiconductor chips in health oriented devices such as the Warmie continuous infection monitoring device, the AppSens 7 Smart Heart Sensor and the Ellume COVID-19 home testing kit.
Asset tracking market will double from $17 billion in 2020 to $34 billion by 2026
Research&Markets quote in Wireless Quarter Magazine
Tracking highlights include:
Tracking elephants with collars
IOSEA’s proprietary AoA/AoD direction finding platform
How asset trackers are moving beyond location monitoring to sensing
While the accuracy of finding is better for the relatively few Apple iPhones that have the Ultra Wideband (UWB) U1 chip, this isn’t likely to be the main advantage and will in any case be lost on most potential buyers. Similarly, Apple’s claim that it’s private and secure is unlikely to be important or seem significant in most scenarios.
Instead, the power of the AirTag will not come from the technical aspects of the physical AirTag but from being part of the Apple ecosystem. The problem with Tile and other trackers is that the range is only local, typically about 50m. When tags are lost away from the vicinity the system relies on other users to detect your tag. This previously hasn’t worked because there haven’t been enough users. The power of the AirTag will be the reach of the Apple device network that no other tag manufacturer will be able to match.
This isn’t to say AirTags will replace iBeacon and Eddystone beacons. AirTags are only for tracking and are more for finding personal things rather than say assets in a warehouse or factory. AirTags only identify and don’t sense like sensor beacons. While they can be seen by Bluetooth gateways, the privacy and security features will thwart identification and use in real time locating systems. AirTags are only a very small, proprietary and closed part of the tracking and sensing ecosystem.
Some manufacturers offer SDKs to allow programmatic access to their beacons from iOS and Android.
Most SDKs tend to be poorly implemented/documented, tie your code into using that particular beacon and rarely get updated to use newer mobile platform APIs. They also tend to be thin abstractions over the Android and iOS Bluetooth APIs.
If you rely on a beacon manufacturer that doesn’t update their SDK, it’s eventually the case that the underlying Android and/or iOS API changes such that your solution becomes non-optimal and, in the worse case, breaks.
Instead, when you can, we recommend you use the iOS and Android Bluetooth APIs directly to make your code independent of the beacon type. In this way you don’t end up depending on intermediate code and this has the benefit that you can more easily change beacon providers.
The platform is free to use and is publicly available. However, devices need be registered with the platform in advance. Requests can be made no more than once per second and you must use https.
Steps to set up the W1 gateway with the Meeblue platform
The API allows you to GET a gateway’s status, POST data from a gateway, GET a sensor device status, POST a sensor’s status, POST and GET sensor storage data.
We now have the INGICS iGS03E Bluetooth to Ethernet gateway in stock. This differs to the iGS02E in that it includes Power over Ethernet (PoE) without having to have an external PoE splitter.
Gateways look 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.
The iGS03E is one of the first gateways to also support Bluetooth 5 in Long Range mode (LE Coded PHY), although very few advertising devices support this yet.
The paper examines signal availability, signal stability and position accuracy under different environmental conditions. The aim was to provide recommendations for iBeacon deployment location, density, transmission interval and fingerprint space interval. While the research considered beacons in teaching and learning environments, the conclusions are also applicable to other situations.
The paper describes positioning using the trilateration and fingerprinting methods. Experiments were performed in a 3.44m to 1.80m classroom to determine optimum beacon placement density.
The main conclusion was that greatest signal attenuation and variation was caused by pedestrian traffic blocking the line of sight between iBeacon and receiver. High temperature and strong winds also caused minor discrepancies to the signals. Trees and nearby vehicle traffic didn’t have any negative effects on the signals.
Deployments should consider the line of sight as the first priority. For the above mentioned room size, positional accuracy increased when the number of beacons was increased from three to eight. Using more beacons didn’t improve accuracy. An average spacing of 4.4m is recommended for iBeacon deployment. A settings of 417ms transmission interval is advised as a compromise between battery life and positional accuracy.
The Bluetooth SIG has published a new Bluetooth Market Update (pdf) based on new research by ABI Research that assesses how the pandemic has affected the market for Bluetooth devices and provides forecasts for the coming years.
The pandemic has impacted device shipments but future annual device shipments are expected to be greater than before the pandemic. Location based services slowed by 25% compared to pre-pandemic 2020 forecasts due to the difficulty in traveling and installing equipment within facilities. Growth is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels throughout 2021, rising to 550,000 implementations by 2025.
Microsoft has a Bluetooth Test Platform (BTP) that can be used to automate testing of Bluetooth hardware, drivers and software.
There’s recently been a new release of the Bluetooth Test Platform (BTP) software package that now provides support for a Bluetooth Virtual Sniffer (BTVS), a graphical tool that collects HCI packets between Windows and the Bluetooth radio controller. Packets can be viewed live in the packet analyzer tool.
Analyzer packet formats include Wireshark, Ellisys and Frontline. There’s a video with further information.
ESP32 are small, low cost Bluetooth/WiFi boards that can be programmed using Arduino IDE. Shogunxam has a project, ESP32 BLETracker that detects Bluetooth LE devices and sends the information to a MQTT server.
The software provides a web interface that allows setting of the devices to be tracked, the scan period, MQTT parameters and viewing of the logs.
The system uses apps and tablet PCs to provide efficient operation of an underground mine loading-transport system. Bluetooth beacons are attached to major loading points and crushing sites and a tablet PC is mounted on trucks that records the time Bluetooth beacons are seen and the location of the truck.
The research was performed in a limestone underground mine in Jeongseon, Korea. It involved 16 loading areas, 4 dumping points and 20 major transport routes.
Mine Levels and Beacons
The app outputs maps, information and voice guidance regarding location when receiving signals from Bluetooth beacons installed at the major points in the mine.
Bluetooth was used because of ease of installation, easy maintenance, no external power requirement and good battery life. The Minew i3 was used because it’s waterproof, works across a wide operating temperature, has a long range and the AA batteries are larger than coin cells so last a lot longer.
The beacons had to be set to maximum power (4 dBm) and transmit often (every 200ms) to allow the tablet PC on the fast-moving truck to receive the signal from the Bluetooth beacon. Wifi was used to transfer data to a central system.
The researchers identified how the Bluetooth system can easily cope with future changes in loading zones and expansion of the system. It provided automatic reports that previously had to be created by hand which wasn’t easy in an underground mine.
While the use is innovative, the system and architecture aren’t that different to systems employed above ground. We would have liked to see Bluetooth mesh beacons used that would have negated the need for Ethernet/WiFi connectivity in the tunnels.
