iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Last week we wrote about Bluetooth Sensors for the Smart Home and how Karl Wachs has been adding lots of our sensor beacons to the indigo domotics Mac-based smart home software.
Karl has posted how he is using an iBS03TP to measure the temperature of his pool.
Please note BeaconZone only supplies Business to Business
Fulham Palace and Norwegian National Museum have recently starting using Bluetooth beacons.
Fulham Palace is using iBeacon with visitor guides. The Covid pandemic has accelerated the trend for iBeacon driven visitor guides. Using visitors’ own devices rather venue-supplied devices removes concerns regarding decontaminating shared devices. Smartphone driven guides also tend to be more interactive and allow visitors to continue to engage with content and venues after they have left the visitor space.
Norwegian National Museum is using beacons to detect the location of museum staff. Staff carry SC21 TETRA hand held radios detect beacons and upload data back to a control room.
TinyGo is a Go compiler for small devices such as microcontrollers. For example, it runs on the BBC micro:bit, Nordic (used in beacons), ESP32, Arduino Uno and Adafruit boards.
Bluetooth LE support has recently been added to TinyGo:
There’s an article on hackster and the open source repository is on GitHub.
Robin is workplace software that allows teams to manage meeting space and desk inventory via an office map. It uses iBeacons to determine worker presence.
People can book meeting rooms, move desks and find their teammates quicker. Analytics allow better understanding of space usage, identification of under-utilized areas and discovery of patterns in occupancy to proactively improve the office layout.
Robin has features that provide for return to work during the Covid pandemic with facilities to set up socially distanced seating plans that allow for your ideal capacity.
Teltonika have an innovative range of advanced vehicle trackers that include Bluetooth. The tracker can scan for other nearby Bluetooth devices and send sensor data to a server.
There’s a getting started guide that explains how this is setup and provides screens showing how it works.
This allows not just for sensing telematics about the vehicles themselves but also about other assets or people. For example, if people carry beacons it’s possible to know who is driving or is in a vehicle. If you tag equipment usually stored in a vehicle you can determine where it is or if it is about to be removed from a vehicle. For temperature sensitive goods, such as medicines, you can continuously audit temperature compliance. It’s also possible to provide for location specific triggering, for example, producing work orders when a vehicle reaches an exact point whether or not there’s GPS coverage.
Karl Wachs, author of the pibeacon plugin for indigo domotics Mac-based smart home software, has a new release on GitHub that includes many INGICS and Minew sensor beacons on our web store.
Indigo domotics provides complex conditions and advanced scheduling via an intuitive interface. The detection of Bluetooth sensors greatly expands the capabilities of the system.
The plugin tracks iBeacons using multiple Raspberry Pis. Sensor data is read and sent to a variety of output devices.
The use of the system isn’t just limited to the smart home. The system can be used in offices and industry SMEs to provide for arbitrary sensor based detection and triggering.
Please note BeaconZone only supplies Business to Business.
Xerox has started using iBeacon to allow AirPrint-enabled Apple devices such as the iPhone, iPad or Mac, to discover nearby AltaLink® printers even when not on the same subnet as the printer.
There’s a ‘Robo woman’ Introduction Video for System Administrators:
This demonstrates an example of iBeacon being used to provide for a better customer experience.
We previously described how social distance beacons differ from ordinary beacons. Devices advertise AND scan rather than just advertise OR scan. The principle is the same with with smartphones using the Apple/Google Exposure Notification API.
The problem with smartphones is that their transmit and receive capabilities vary widely. The received signal strength (RSSI) is inconsistent across types of smartphone and you can’t determine distance reliably. Apple and Google have mitigated this problem by attempting to create a database of calibration values (csv).
The calibration data is useful for Bluetooth developers creating solutions across devices. However, it’s of no use for 3rd party contact tracing as only Government agencies can use the Exposure Notification API and Apple is banning Covid related apps.
Read about Beacons for Workplace Social Distancing and Contact Tracing.
There’s a new paper on DE-auth of the Blue! Transparent De-authentication Using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon. While the paper is behind a paywall, the paper’s abstract provides enough information to determine the intent.
When people move away from their desk, for example for lunch, they often don’t log out. It can be some time before the screen saver kicks in and logs the user out. The paper takes a look at the use of beacons to provide de-authentication when the person moves away from their desk.
This is a much simpler method than previous research that used Seated Posture Biometrics (pdf).
GroupMe is Microsoft’s free messaging application that works across HoloLens, PC and mobile devices. GroupMe is published by the Skype part of Microsoft.
We recently learnt that it’s possible to use iBeacon to add members.
This is another example of an application adding iBeacon support as a side feature as opposed to using iBeacon to drive the main purpose of the application. Applications can gain ease of use by using iBeacons for locating.
