Support – Page 42 – BeaconZone Blog

Bluetooth 5 Support

We are starting to see the first beacons and gateways that truly support Bluetooth 5 even though the standard was released in 2016. Up to recently, some have claimed to support Bluetooth 5 in that the internal hardware and software (SDK) was Bluetooth 5 capable but most, if not all, of the Bluetooth 5 features weren’t available.

Compatibility is dependent on smartphones supporting Bluetooth 5 that has also only come to fruition with recent phone models. Most Android smartphones manufactured in the last few years use Android 10 or Android 11 that has Bluetooth 5 software support. However, the Bluetooth chip inside the smartphone also needs to support Bluetooth 5. On iOS, all including and after iPhone 8/8 Plus/iPhone X support Bluetooth 5.

Furthermore, there’s also the complication that Smartphones claim to be Bluetooth 5 capable but might not support many of the optional features. One way to test which features are supported is to use the Nordic Semiconductor nRF Connect app. Here’s an example from the ‘Device Information’ section of the app running on a Pixel 3a XL:

Download the Bluetooth Core Specification Version 5.0 Feature Overview for explanation of these features.

Using Bluetooth Beacons to Measure Gait Speed

There’s recent research into using Bluetooth beacons to measure human gait speed. The ability to walk can be used as a core indicator of health in aging and disease. For example, it can enable early detection of cognitive diseases such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers at Universitat Jaume I and University of Extremadura, Spain, have created a new dataset. In their paper BLE-GSpeed: A New BLE-Based Dataset to Estimate User Gait Speed (pdf) they describe how they collected the data.

The database is freely available and includes:

mac: The MAC address of the detected beacon.
rssi: The RSSI value obtained for the beacon.
device: A four-character descriptor for the smartwatch that performed the scan.
timestamp: The time stamp at which the scan was received.
user: The id of the user that was performing the experiment.
direction: A number (0 or 1) indicating the direction of the walk.
walk_id: A number that identifies each walk.
speed: The actual speed of the user, in $m/s$.

It database contains RSSI measurements from different wearable devices and different BLE beacons, corresponding to 382 walks performed by 13 actors. The open source code used is available on GitHub.

Flutter Beacon Plugin

Flutter is a UI software development platform created by Google used to develop cross platform applications for Android and iOS.

There’s a recent plugin flutter_beacon that scans for beacons and can also act as a transmitter. It supports Android API 18+ and iOS 8+. Features include permission management, iBeacon ranging, iBeacon monitoring and transmitting as iBeacon. This plugin is open source on Github.

Beacon Coin Cell Battery Orientation

When inserting or replacing coin cell batteries it’s necessary to know which way round to place the battery. This is especially so for some of our beacons where the battery is separate or not included.

The following image shows the orientation of the battery. The -ve ‘button’ side of the battery fits against the printed circuit board. The side that faces away from the beacon circuit board is +ve. This is common to just about all beacons. Note that this is different to commonly used batteries, such as AA batteries, where the ‘button’ end is +ve.

Here’s another example showing a commonly used metal battery holder:

If you put the battery in the other way around then you might damage the beacon or, more likely, short circuit the battery as most battery holders are metal wrap around types.

Nordic Semiconductor Wireless Q Magazine Out Now

Nordic Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) used in many beacons, has published the latest online issue of Wireless Quarter Magazine. It showcases the many uses of Nordic SoCs.

The pandemic has increased the use of Nordic Semiconductor chips in health oriented devices such as the Warmie continuous infection monitoring device, the AppSens 7 Smart Heart Sensor and the Ellume COVID-19 home testing kit.

Asset tracking market will double from $17 billion in 2020 to $34 billion by 2026
Research&Markets quote in Wireless Quarter Magazine

Tracking highlights include:

Tracking elephants with collars
IOSEA’s proprietary AoA/AoD direction finding platform
How asset trackers are moving beyond location monitoring to sensing

The Power of the AirTag

Apple announced AirTag this week. Many commentators are asking what’s different or better than Tile and other Bluetooth trackers. Some are even asking why Apple is such an innovative company.

While the accuracy of finding is better for the relatively few Apple iPhones that have the Ultra Wideband (UWB) U1 chip, this isn’t likely to be the main advantage and will in any case be lost on most potential buyers. Similarly, Apple’s claim that it’s private and secure is unlikely to be important or seem significant in most scenarios.

Instead, the power of the AirTag will not come from the technical aspects of the physical AirTag but from being part of the Apple ecosystem. The problem with Tile and other trackers is that the range is only local, typically about 50m. When tags are lost away from the vicinity the system relies on other users to detect your tag. This previously hasn’t worked because there haven’t been enough users. The power of the AirTag will be the reach of the Apple device network that no other tag manufacturer will be able to match.

This isn’t to say AirTags will replace iBeacon and Eddystone beacons. AirTags are only for tracking and are more for finding personal things rather than say assets in a warehouse or factory. AirTags only identify and don’t sense like sensor beacons. While they can be seen by Bluetooth gateways, the privacy and security features will thwart identification and use in real time locating systems. AirTags are only a very small, proprietary and closed part of the tracking and sensing ecosystem.

Should I Use the Manufacturer iBeacon SDKs?

Some manufacturers offer SDKs to allow programmatic access to their beacons from iOS and Android.

Most SDKs tend to be poorly implemented/documented, tie your code into using that particular beacon and rarely get updated to use newer mobile platform APIs. They also tend to be thin abstractions over the Android and iOS Bluetooth APIs.

If you rely on a beacon manufacturer that doesn’t update their SDK, it’s eventually the case that the underlying Android and/or iOS API changes such that your solution becomes non-optimal and, in the worse case, breaks.

Instead, when you can, we recommend you use the iOS and Android Bluetooth APIs directly to make your code independent of the beacon type. In this way you don’t end up depending on intermediate code and this has the benefit that you can more easily change beacon providers.

Alternatively, use an independent 3rd party library such as Radius Network’s iOS SDK or one of the many Android Bluetooth libraries.

New Meeblue Platform

Meeblue has a new platform for users of the W1 Bluetooth WiFi gateway. It’s designed to work with Meeblue sensor beacons to easily capture and view sensor data.

The platform is free to use and is publicly available. However, devices need be registered with the platform in advance. Requests can be made no more than once per second and you must use https.

Steps to set up the W1 gateway with the Meeblue platform

The API allows you to GET a gateway’s status, POST data from a gateway, GET a sensor device status, POST a sensor’s status, POST and GET sensor storage data.

View All Gateways

New iGS03E Bluetooth Ethernet Gateway in Stock

We now have the INGICS iGS03E Bluetooth to Ethernet gateway in stock. This differs to the iGS02E in that it includes Power over Ethernet (PoE) without having to have an external PoE splitter.

Gateways look for Bluetooth LE devices and sends their advertising on to a server via TCP, HTTP(S) or MQTT including AWS IoT. If you use with sensor beacons, this provides a quick and easy way to provide for IoT sensing.

The iGS03E is one of the first gateways to also support Bluetooth 5 in Long Range mode (LE Coded PHY), although very few advertising devices support this yet.

Compatible with BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™.

Which Beacons are the Most Compatible?

We get asked a lot which beacons are the most compatible. All beacons, whether iBeacon or Eddystone, are compatible with iOS and Android. There are a few ‘tracker’ type Bluetooth devices around that don’t transmit the right Bluetooth header and can’t be seen on iOS but we don’t sell those.

Almost all beacons are slight derivations of a few standard circuit designs and firmware provided by Texas Instruments, Dialog and Nordic who produce the System On a Chip (SoC) inside beacons. Hence, they all transmit to Bluetooth standards.

Use of standard SoC Chip and firmware libraries ensures Bluetooth compatibility

The main area that can differ is the Antenna and PCB layout that can lead to different radiation patterns. The ability to detect a beacon isn’t affected and differences manifest themselves as differing beacon signal strength (hence range) and stability.

The main areas where beacons differ is not in compatibility but in physical characteristics such as battery size and waterproofing that are to be found as categories at the left hand side of our store.

One thing people don’t realise is that problems occur with phone compatibility rather than beacon compatibility. Over time, we have discovered about 5% of our customers have problems getting the Manufacturer’s configuration to app connect to beacons on Android. To be clear, this is only when apps need to connect (to change settings) as opposed to only scan for beacons so this doesn’t tend to be a problem (for end users) once everything is set up.

To answer the question, Bluetooth standards are such that all beacons can be seen on all phones and compatibility isn’t an issue. Problems we have seen have been related to phones rather than beacons. We have never had a beacon returned to us because it’s incompatible.