iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Moko has a new video showing the W2 wearable beacon being placed in water:
The W2 advertises iBeacon, Eddystone and acceleration. It’s rechargeable via USB and can be configured to provide continuous, button triggered or motion triggered advertising.
The acceleration sensor is the STMicroelectronics LIS3DH that’s configurable for scales of up to ±2g/±4g/±8g/±16g.
Bluetooth tags/beacons detect the position of people and assets. Software maps jobs, valuable tools, parts, sub-assemblies and people onto your floor plans or maps.
The main uses are:
Bluetooth LE is particularly suitable because it is:
The end result is reduced downtime, less time re-ordering or re-making things that have been lost, optimum productivity and better use of skilled staff doing their job rather than searching for assets and people.
Read about Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)
Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building native applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. There are plugins that add functionality to Flutter. One such plugin is the beacon_plugin that makes it easier to scan and range iBeacons on iOS and Android. The plugin is open source on GitHub.
Occasionally, our customers ask for things we didn’t expect, contradictory requirements or requests that require unusual solutions. Here are some examples:
These examples demonstrate what’s right for one project isn’t necessarily right for others. This is why we stock the widest beacon range in the World.
We have the new MeeBlue W1 Bluetooth WiFi Gateway in Stock. It senses nearby Bluetooth beacons and send the data to your server as HTTP JSON data.
The gateway can filter by MAC address, Bluetooth Service Id or iBeacon (UUID, Major and Minor or subsets).
Gluon is a Java-based cross platform tool that creates applications for desktop, Android and iOS devices using the Gluon Scene Builder.
There’s a Beacons code sample that shows how to scan for beacons or broadcast as a beacon.
There’s new research by Sotirios Kontogiannis and Christodoulos Asiminidis of University of Ioannina, Greece on A Proposed Low-Cost Viticulture Stress Framework for Table Grape Varieties.
The system automatically monitors vine stress to provide real-time surveillance and alerts. It identifies specific areas for irrigation, thereby saving water, energy and time.
The Bluetooth iBeacon protocol is used to relay temperature, humidity, UV levels and soil moisture levels. The authors modified the standard iBeacon protocol, using the existing iBeacon minor and major fields to encode the telemetry data.
You can find the processor chip in the specification section of our beacon descriptions. Most people don’t know what this means or implies. This article will help you make a more informed choice.
There are currently three main chip families from Texas Instruments (CC25xx, CC26xx), Dialog Semiconductor (DAxxxx) and Nordic Semiconductor (nRF51xxx and nRF52xxx). These chip manufacturers publish standard electronic circuits and software SDKs that beacon OEMs use for their beacons. Hence, most beacons, within a chip family, have very similar designs. Small differences in implementation of board layout in areas such as the power supply, grounding, terminations, connectors and the antenna can cause electrical differences that can cause loss of power.
The strength of the beacon radio signal is affected more by the quality of the beacon implementation, particularly the antenna, rather than the choice of chip. This is also evident in real world tests. We have performed RSSI strength and stability tests on the beacons we sell and haven’t yet found any correlation between signal strength and chip family.
The choice of SoC affects battery use. Newer chip families such as the Nordic nRF52 (as opposed to nRF51) and Texas Instruments CC2640 (as opposed to CC2541) are more power efficient.
Most beacon SoCs transmit up to +4dBm output power for a longer range. A few such as the nRF52840 and CC2640RF can be set to higher output power of +8dBm and +5dBM respectively, with a consequent reduction of battery life. If you are looking for longer range, it’s more usual to use a long range beacon with an additional output amplifier chip.
The newer SoCs have much more memory. This isn’t used for most beacons except for those that store data.
The use of standard SoC manufacturer designs and software means that all beacons work well, adhere to Bluetooth standards and compatibility is never a problem.
BeaconRTLS™ has a myriad of uses across logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and facilities management. It tracks assets and people to locate them in real time and detect anomalies to improve operational efficiency. This also extends to IoT sensing using sensor beacons that measure temperature, humidity, movement, light, proximity and open/closed.
The system allows you to search for and map the location of beacons. You can set up screen and email alerts based on asset type, location and sensor data. But what if you need more than this?
BeaconRTLS™ stores historical information which provides for industry or scenario specific reporting. For example, recent customers have been asking for Covid specific reports such as room occupancy and who has been in the same room at the same time.
The BeaconRTLS™ API allows your systems or reporting systems to access the data. However, this is of less use for those who want to implement solutions quickly and easily. The tricky part is that we have found every customer tends to need different reporting. Up until now we have been creating ad-hoc reports on a case by case basis.
We have been looking to standardise how custom reports are created with BeaconRTLS™ to reduce effort, time and cost and allow more customers to create reports for themselves. To enable this we have integrated BeaconRTLS™ with Grafana.
Grafana is a free, commonly used open source platform that allows you to show data in custom ways using dashboards and panels. We are creating example Grafana reports for use with BeaconRTLS™ that our customers can use directly or modify for their own use.
Contact us if you are interested in using BeaconRTLS™ and would like to take part in the pilot of BeaconRTLS™ with Grafana.
