Partnerships & Ecosystems for Industrial IoT

There’s a useful new post on the Nordic blog on Partnerships & Ecosystems for Industrial IoT. Nordic is the manufacturer of the System-on-a Chip (SoC) in most beacons and Lorenzo is one of their Business Development Managers.

The blog post makes the case for companies not to try to go it alone. The newness and complexity of technologies is such that it’s unlikely you have the skills in-house. What’s more, you

“won’t know what you don’t know”

We have found that it’s often the case with organisations taking up our consultancy, that they ask particular questions when their real problems are somewhere else. They are oblivious to the unknown unknowns.

Another common situation we come across is companies setting off in the wrong direction, doing lots of work and realising it doesn’t work. They contact us for quick fix but sometimes one doesn’t exist. Once you get in deep, it can be hard to pull out and even when things partially work you can end up with long term problems due to poor initial decisions.

The Nordic blog post advocates finding partners. One thing we have found is not to partner with anyone and everyone, at any cost. Only partner when there’s a clear synergy. Be clear whether you really will be a partner or customer. Although there can be some overlap, some unscrupulous companies use partnership as a guise for selling.

Minew G1 Gateway in Stock

We have the new Minew G1 gateway in stock. The G1 gateway collects advertising data from iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth LE sensor and other Bluetooth LE devices and  sends it to your server by HTTP(S) or MQTT/ using WiFi or Ethernet.

Special features of this gateway are that that it supports both WiFi and Ethernet and has a high throughput of up to 200 Bluetooth LE devices detected per second.

Minew USB UART Beacon in Stock

We have a selection of beacons that are powered from USB. However, up until now, very few of them have been controllable via USB.

We now stock the Minew U1 that has a CP2104 USB Serial converter that causes the device to show as a serial COM port device. This allows you to control it from other devices such as PCs, laptops, Linux or Android, as well as from the iOS/Android apps.

Why might you want to do this? Scenarios such as use with digital signage and video walls in shopping malls and stadiums sometimes need the beacon advertising to change in real-time as the display information changes. UART connected beacons allows the beacon advertising to be changed by the host device.

Location-based Ambient Intelligence

ABI Research predicts that there’s going to be an increase in beacon-enabled app shipments mainly due to retail and ambient intelligence:

So what is ambient intelligence? It’s a catch all term for the joining of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, the connected home, wearables, smartphones, voice/image recognition and artificial intelligence through machine learning.

Sensor beacons enable the gathering of new data. New data not only measures physical things but, more importantly, provides a way of circumventing the problem of silo data in many large organisations. Silo data is data people/departments don’t want to share for fear of losing power or control. Today’s machine learning techniques also require data to be in a specific format and ‘clean’. Creating new data allows it to be more readily formatted and conditioned prior to saving.

This isn’t just about location data. It includes physical quantities such as smaller-scale movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate and fall detection. Our conversations with beacon manufacturers tell us beacons are currently being developed that detect more nuanced quantities such as colour, gas and UV. Some beacons already have general purpose input/output (GPIO) such that custom beacons can can already detect anything for which there’s an electronic sensor.

So why Bluetooth beacons rather than other electronics with the same sensors? Here are the main reasons:

  • Integration without soldering or, in most cases, without custom electronics
  • Communication with iOS and Android apps and computers via existing Bluetooth APIs
  • Remote, low power, data acquisition where there’s no mains power and no connectivity at the place of measurement
  • Significantly lower cost compared to traditional industrial sensing

The Status of Manufacturing and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)

There’s an article in The Manufacturer magazine on “Manufacturing:the numbers” that highlights some numbers from the Hennik Research’s Annual Manufacturing Report.

In practice, we are finding many organisations are struggling to develop skills, business processes and organisational willpower to implement 4IR. There’s a relatively slow pace in many industries, driven down by the uncertainties of Brexit, Europe and International trading tensions.

Nevertheless, we believe that once these political issues start to play out, the more forward-thinking manufacturers will realise they have to revolutionise their processes in order to compete in an market with complex labour availability and tighter margins due to tariffs. Manufacturers that are able to harness 4IR effectively will be the ones that will be able to differentiate themselves, while the laggards will find themselves more and more at a disadvantage.

Read about Sensing for Industry and IoT
Read about Machine Learning

Bluetooth IoT Sensors

There’s a type of beacon that doesn’t send out iBeacon or Eddystone advertising. Instead, it sends out standard Bluetooth 4.0 advertising containing sensor values. This means the data can be picked up via apps, gateways, Raspberry Pis or other devices that can see Bluetooth advertising.

An example of this is the INGICS iBS01 range of beacons.

The round bit in the middle is a button that can be pressed. Here’s an example for the data from the iBS01T temperature/humidity sensor:

Additionally, the ‘event’ data gives the state of the button press.

Read more about Using Bluetooth Wireless Sensors

Sensor Beacons

Android Physical Web App Removed from the Play Store

Important: This web page is provided for historical purposes.

On 25 October 2018, Google announced they are discontinuing Nearby Notifications on Android. This mechanism should no longer be used.

Read about using Beacons for Marketing

Google has removed the Android Physical Web app from the Play Store. This provided a way of scanning for Eddystone beacons without relying on the built-in Android Nearby functionality. As previously mentioned, the Google Physical web team was disbanded. Google have now removed the app, presumably because there’s no-one to maintain it in tandem with new versions of Android. Here’s the final Android Physical Web APK if you wish to side-load the file.

The iOS Physical Web app is also no longer available. The iOS version wasn’t written by Google and has recently been taken over by the non-profit Physical Web Association. 

Using iBeacons for Motorola TRBONet

Motorola MOTOTRBO range two-way Radios can be used with the Motorola-supplied TRBOnet PLUS (pdf) control room software to show the location of workers with digital radios on maps and plans. The radios contain both GPS and iBeacon detection to allow locating indoors.

There are three places where iBeacons need to be set up in TRBOnet:

In the GPS profile:

Placing beacon on the map:

Are you an established 2-way radio company?
Contact us for advice on which beacons we have supplied for use with TRBONet.

Read the full User Guide
View compatible beacons

iBeacon App Mechanism

People often come to us with the wrong impression how iBeacon apps can work. They think an app can sit in the background and suddenly come to the foreground when an iBeacon is detected. If you think about it, no 3rd party apps work like this, taking over your screen, and for good reason. It’s seen as intrusive by users and both iOS and Android prevent this. Instead, apps need to show a notification which, if tapped on, goes to the app or a screen within the app.

On iOS, apps don’t actually do the detecting of beacons. iOS detects beacons with ids that have been pre-declared by the app. When an app isn’t running, iOS starts the app for only a short time to allow it to show a notification.

On Android, prior to Android 8, you could have a background service scanning for beacons. However, Android has become more like iOS. Newer Android ‘Doze’ and background restrictions mean you have to use newer Bluetooth APIs to detect beacons when the app isn’t running.

iBeacons For Apple Passkit

A little known, under-promoted use of iBeacons is with Apple Passkit. Passkit allows you to create and distribute things like coupons, boarding passes, store cards, event tickets, promotions, offers or just information that can end up in the built-in iOS Wallet app. After adding a pass into the wallet, a user can get a notification about the pass when they are near an iBeacon associated with the pass, all without installing an app. There are lots of uses particularly in retail, events and hospitality.

The Apple developer documentation explains how the Wallet works and the passkit reference shows the iBeacon related set up fields.

An important thing to realise is that the beacon doesn’t send the pass to the smartphones. They just cause the triggering. You need to provide a mechanism, usually via a web site, where users can download the pass from your web server. Your server must be secure (HTTPS) and use a SSL certificate from a known certificate authority. Self-signed certificates won’t work. You will also have to set your server to serve the application/vnd.apple.pkpass MIME type when hosting the pass file.

There’s a useful example by Tom Harrington who shows how he created a Passbook Business Card. If you are not a technical person and it all looks too complicated, PassKit Inc  (nothing to do with Apple) have a platform based on Apple Wallet.

Apple Passkit works with all iBeacons.