Author: Support

New Minew MG3

The MG3 is a new mini USB Bluetooth-WiFi gateway.


It’s a more affordable version of the G1 with slightly less capability:

The MG3 collects advertising data from all Bluetooth LE devices and then sends JSON data to your server by HTTP(S) or MQTT using WiFi.

The MG3 processes up to 70 Bluetooth devices per second. The maximum range is 70 meters in open space but this depends more on the range of beacons being detected.

Youtube video showing setup

Configurable data collection settings include the upload method (HTTP(S) or MQTT), server URL, upload interval, RSSI filter, MAC address filter (RegEx), raw Bluetooth filter (RegEx) and the time zone.

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High Temperature Measurement Using Beacons

Beacons can’t withstand very high temperatures due to the battery that can only typically operate up to +60°C. If you need to measure higher temperatures, it’s necessary to use a beacon with a temperature probe with just the probe being placed in the higher temperature environment.

iBS03TP Probe -50°C to 150°C

This beacon is also suitable for measuring low temperatures, down to -50°C, whereas non-probe beacons are usually limited to -30°C due to the battery.

New Minew MBT01 and MVS01 Asset Tracking Beacons

We now sell Minew’s MBT01 and MVS01 Asset Tracking Beacons.

MBT01
MVS01

The MBT01 differs from most beacons in that it has a switch at the back that can be used to detect if the beacon has been removed from a surface. It advertises ‘normal’ (every 5 secs) or ‘tamper alarm’ (every 1 sec) depending on the status.

The MVS01 is unique in that it has a vibration sensor with five configurable sensitivity levels. It sends extra advertising when moved.

View Minew Products

Moko Factory Video

Moko, one of our manufacturers, has a new video showing two beacons being assembled in their factory.

Moko is one of the more innovative companies being the only one to have mixed Bluetooth and LoRWAN. Their LW003-B Bluetooth LoRaWAN Probe scans for beacons and reports detected beacons via LoRa.

LW003-B Bluetooth LoRaWAN Probe

This allows beacons to be detected in remote places, such as farm fields, where there’s no WiFi or Ethernet connectivity.

Reducing Bluetooth WiFi Gateway Connections

When a Bluetooth WiFi Gateway sends data to a server via HTTP, the gateway has to connect to the server to start a connection and then use that connection to send the data. The connection part starts a new TCP connection with handshaking. Starting a new connection every time data needs to be sent to the server uses network data and creates work for the server.

iGS01S

Some gateways such as the IGS01s have a ‘keep-alive’ setting that allows the connection to be re-used across HTTP requests. This reduces the amount of data used on metered networks such as cellular, reduces possibly metered data throughput at the server and also reduces server loading thus improving performance.

Having said all this, you should consider MQTT if you are really concerned about efficiency and performance.

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Beacons and WiFi Interference

As Bluetooth and WiFi both use the 2.4GHz band, is it possible that they can interfere with one another? John-Paul Little has a old post on Can iBeacon deployments cause WI-FI interference. The conclusion is no, it won’t, as there’s negligible overlap between the WiFi and Beacon frequencies:

channels

The 2.4GHz band is split into smaller frequencies, called channels, such that more than one technology can share the same band.

Also, at the practical level, we have used WiFi and (many) Beacons together on many projects and we have never experienced a problem. Although still rare, it’s more likely that multiple Bluetooth devices can interfere.

INGICS Example Server Side Platform

INGICS, supplier of Bluetooth WiFi gateways and sensor beacons, has a new open source example. The BeaconLair code is implemented using Docker to simplify setup. Internally it uses Golang, Eclipse Mosquitto, InfluxDB and Grafana. The platform receives data from INGICS iGS03 BLE gateways and data from iBS sensor beacons.

The dashboard, using Grafana, provides gateways remote control, viewing of beacons and beacon sensor values.

INGICSLair

It can be used to remotely control gateways including device OTA upgrade, changing of the RSSI filters and provides configuration using all supported telnet commands.

View INGICS products

Working with GATT on Android

Most of the time, beacons transmit and the receiving software such as apps on iOS and Android or applications on single board computers (SBC) only read the advertising data. There’s no connection to the beacon. However, for programmatic setup of beacon parameters or accessing some sensor data, applications might need to connect via what’s known as Bluetooth GATT.

There’s an article on How to Work Properly With BT LE On Android. It provides some useful pointers such as not performing scanning and GATT connection simultaneously, avoiding auto-connect and not blocking GATT callbacks.

GATT can be unreliable on Android. While scanning for advertising data usually works very well, we have found that GATT connections fail all the time on about 5% of devices. This is due to poorly implemented OS Bluetooth software. This means beacon manufacturer-supplied configuration apps sometimes can’t connect. The only solution is to use a different phone (or the iOS version of the app on iPhone).