{"id":2963,"date":"2019-01-16T12:21:50","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T12:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2963"},"modified":"2019-01-21T09:23:31","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T09:23:31","slug":"inside-a-beacon-part-1-the-physical-beacon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/inside-a-beacon-part-1-the-physical-beacon\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside a Beacon – Part 1 – The Physical Beacon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is part 1 of a 3 part series that explains what’s inside a beacon. In this part we take a look at the physical beacon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All beacons are similar inside because they are based on standard circuit designs from Nordic Semiconductor, Dialog Semiconductor or Texas Instruments. These semiconductor manufacturers produce a complete system on a chip (SoC) that requires minimal external components. The SoC is a small computer with memory that runs software created by the manufacturer of the beacon. We will take a deeper look at the SoC in part 2 and the software in part 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this series of articles we going to take a deeper look at Minew’s i7 beacon. It’s based on Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52832 SoC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Minew i7<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Inside the case is a PCB with a CR2477 slide in battery at the rear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Inside the i7<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The main chip you can see is the mRF52832. At the top you can also see the antenna that’s created using a track in the printed circuit board. The holes at the bottom right are connections used to program the beacon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand more, we need to look at the printed circuit board design and circuit schematic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
i7 design<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Circuit diagram – click to see larger in new window<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It can be seen that there aren’t many external components. Y1, the metal component at the top is the crystal used to maintain timing. The SoC has a number of programmable input\/output (PIO) pins that are multi-purpose. In a beacon some are usually connected to LEDs and a switch as shown at the left hand side of the circuit diagram. There are also capacitors that need to be external to the SoC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U2, U3 and U4 are optional for this beacon and missing from this variant of the i7. U2 is the KX022-1020 accelerometer<\/a>. U3 is the SHT31 temperature\/humidity sensor<\/a>. U4 is the BH1721 light sensor<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In part 2<\/a> we take a closer look at the nRF52 SoC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is part 1 of a 3 part series that explains what’s inside a beacon. In this part we take a look at the physical beacon. All beacons are similar inside because they are based on standard circuit designs from Nordic Semiconductor, Dialog Semiconductor or Texas Instruments. These semiconductor manufacturers produce a complete system on … Continue reading “Inside a Beacon – Part 1 – The Physical Beacon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,41,90],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2963"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3012,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions\/3012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beaconzone.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}