BeaconZone at IoT Thames Valley Meetup

We were exhibiting at the IoT Thames Valley Meetup on Wednesday:

Our stand at IoT Thames Valley Meetup

Here’s what happened with a few insights from the presentations:

Richard Fargus, Managing Director, Voytech Systems spoke about ‘Commercial Deployment of IoT solutions in Building Monitoring
and Control’. He mentioned how, using TCPI/IP over cellular is very inefficient. For example, 2 bytes of data can balloon up to 5000 to 1000 bytes which can be costly.

Richard Kinder, VP, Head of Product Marketing, Wirepas covered ‘Industrial IoT requires fit for purpose connectivity’. He spoke about wireless mesh networking. He mentioned how increasing the Lora power in an urban environment gives negligible improvement in range.

Nick Baker, Director, Adaptive Wireless Solutions gave ‘Wireless IoT – lessons learned from industrial implementations’. He spoke about 2.4GHz mesh networks used for various clients. He emphasied the need for solutions to be reliable and easy to implement. He also mentioned (the recurring theme) that there’s no one vertical market or solution.

Richard Foggie, Executive Knowledge Transfer Network, spoke about IoT networking and funding opportunities from the Government KTN.

Mike Bartley, CEO T&VS gave a talk on ‘Avoiding the Internet of Insecure Things’ via test and certification.

Leonard Anderson, Kemuri Limited, presented his IoT Power Sockets.

Graham Kitteridge gave a lightening talk on Think Engineer, who create custom hardware prototypes.

Bluetooth at the London IoT Tech Expo

We visited the IoT Tech Expo today in London. The event seemed to be about twice the size of last year’s smaller IoT TechExpo which shows the growth in interest in IoT. Also, it’s the first time there’s a presence by one of the IT ‘heavyweights’, Microsoft. However, the large number of IoT platform providers exhibiting doesn’t bode well for that particular sector. They can’t all survive. We found the Tech Expo a bit strange in that it has some end-user, consumer IoT solutions exhibiting next door to components suppliers, industrial sensors and software suppliers. The IoT Expo doesn’t really know yet what it is or rather who it is targeted at – much like IoT we suppose.

Here’s what we saw that was Bluetooth LE specific:

  • As with last year, bean iot where showing their sensor Bluetooth LE bean. They are now showing actual working beans rather than printed circuit boards. They also have a backend showing sensor data from the beans.
  • Blue ID were promoting their secure access solutions.
  • Advantech were showing their IoT Gateway Solutions that support Bluetooth.
  • Insight SIP were exhibiting their Bluetooth LE modules.

Bluetooth Beacons in Higher Education

Sheffield Hallam University recently published a new paper by Kieran McDonald and Ian Glover on Exploring the transformative potential of Bluetooth.

The paper provides a great introduction to beacons and explores topics such as learning mediated through non-human agents and studio-based learning. It includes results of a study into how and where students prefer to work.

An ‘intervention’ as they call it, used beacons to provide more more timely information about the technical aspects of courses. This resulted in students feeling closer and more connected to tutors leading to increased efficiency and interaction.

There’s also an associated slideshare presentation by Ian Glover, one of the authors.

Beacons in the Hospitality Sector

Carnival Cruises has started to roll out ‘Ocean Medallion™‘, a beacon that allows you to board the ship, open your room door, navigate the ship, find your family and friends onboard, make reservations and order and pay for food and drinks.

This is a significant and well thought out rollout for many reasons:

  • Large undertaking – In order to use the system, each ship is being fitted with 75 miles (121km) of cables, more than 7,000 sensors and 4,000 digital screens.
  • Mass market promotion – it has even been mentioned on the BBC.
  • First large rollout to use beacons with NFC – As we previously mentioned, NFC can be used for, closer, security-related activities such as payment.
  • Used as a USP – The How It Works web page is using the added convenience as a unique selling point.
  • No battery life problems – The beacon only has to transmit and last as long as the holiday.
  • User Experience aware – The beacon has been designed to look like jewellery to gain acceptance. It’s engraved with the customer’s name and can be worn as a necklace, clip or on a keychain.

The clever part is that the gains aren’t just for Carnival cruise guests. The new system will also allow more personal location information to be gathered that can be used offer better targeted promotions and hence help increase revenue per customer.

Using Beacons For a Library Tour

There’s an interesting article at code4lib on Creation of a Library Tour Application for Mobile Equipment using iBeacon Technology by Virginia Tech. It describes a project where a QR code driven library tour was updated to use beacons.

Some insights include how attractive beacons can become ‘lost’, the problem of replacing batteries, limited battery life due to the iOS requirement for beacons to advertise every 100ms and challenges physically fixing beacons.

As mentioned in our article on Choosing an Advertising Interval, it’s possible to set the advertising interval to between 300ms and 600ms while maintaining a reasonable detection time. Also, had the library chosen Android tablets they could have used a much longer advertising interval. 100ms is an artificial thing set by Apple for very quick detection on iOS devices. On Android, the scanning is more controllable,you can scan for longer and hence have beacons that advertise less often and have much longer battery life.

Bluetooth 5 and Beacons

We have been receiving enquiries about Bluetooth 5 and how it affects beacons. Some people have even asked “where are the Bluetooth 5 beacons?”

In terms of beacons, Bluetooth 5 provides:

  • x4 the range
  • x2 the speed
  • increase broadcast advertising message size x 800%

The greater range will benefit most new beacon implementations but there are already some Bluetooth 4 ultra long range beacons with output power amplifiers that boost the Bluetooth 4 range from the typical 50m to 300m.

The speed increase probably won’t be noticed as it’s the discovery/connection time rather than the ‘bits per second’ that’s usually the determining factor for the few beacon users who connect to beacons.

Additionally, there’s also deeper access into the physical host controller interface so that the speed and range can be configured to adjust for different scenarios but it remains to be seen if this will be used in beacon implementations.

The most significant change for beacons is the larger advertising data size. This means the beacon can more easily transmit sensor, telemetry or new types of data. It will potentially also allow Eddystone-URL to do away with the need for URL shorteners but, even if this happens, some applications might still use them for other reasons such as easily being able to redirect the URL to elsewhere.

For those of you wanting Bluetooth 5 now, you will need to wait. While there’s already SoC chips, such as the nRF52840, that support Bluetooth 5, other things such as the iBeacon/Eddystone specs need to catch up to (possibly) use the new advertising data size. Also, (new) phones will need to catch up to support Bluetooth 5. After that, Android and iOS will probably need updated OS Bluetooth APIs. Only once the ecosystem is in place will the majority of beacon manufacturers see it’s worth it to release new Bluetooth 5 beacons.

All this isn’t going to happen overnight. When it does, we might end up with a fragmented and more-complicated ecosystem where older Bluetooth 4 phones won’t be able to take advantage of the newer features of the Bluetooth 5 beacons.

Beacons for Smart Technologies in Tourism

There’s a thought provokingresearch paper, by Breda University of Applied Sciences (pdf) no longer available, prepared for last year’s International Tourism Student Conference on Smart Technologies in Tourism.

It’s based around a case study of 232 iBeacons having been used at SAIL Amsterdam forming five private and public beacon networks. The paper discusses what Smart Tourism is, how to measure customer experience and the various phases a tourist goes through (anticipatory, planning, experiential, reflection).

69,000 people, 3% of all SAIL visitors, used the app and of these 47% had their Bluetooth turned on. Nevertheless, this allowed the organisers to track visitors’ behavior and manage visitor flows. It was the end user features of the app/system that were less utilised than they could have been.

The paper discusses visitors’ perceived loss of privacy when installing the app. The solution is seen to be to ensure that users perceive the provision of their data/location as a fair deal to receiving information. Another issue is being careful when sending out push notifications as psychological factors can have big influence on customers’ reaction to them. Another issue discussed is the differing interests of the developers, sponsors and SAIL organisers when creating the app.

Success in using beacons and apps is tied to how much information visitors have on the possibilities and benefits in installing and using (turning Bluetooth on) the app. As the paper says:

“Organisers need to provide extensive information about the technology and the proper usage of it in order to profit from the maximum services that the apps offer.”

Tracker Beacons Now In Stock

We now have some tracker Bluetooth beacons in stock. Tracker beacons are Bluetooth beacons designed specifically for tracking physical items or remote camera button-type applications but they can be used for other purposes. Unlike iBeacon, Eddystone and Sensor beacons, there’s no configuration app, the Bluetooth advertising data is fixed and can’t be re-configured.

Tracker beacons differ from (most) iBeacons in that they, once connected via Bluetooth GATT, allow the beacon to ring, can detect a beacon button press and the beacon can ring when it goes out of range.

Tracker beacons can also be used, without GATT connection, to detect presence by using their MAC address on Android/gateways, or peripheral id on iOS CoreBluetooth, to uniquely identify them.

There are many poor quality tracker beacons on the market that are unreliable. It has taken us a while to find quality tracker beacons that also have known Bluetooth Services/Characteristics for programming purposes.