Support – Page 55 – BeaconZone Blog

Pre-configured Beacons Ease Rollout

Once your solution has been developed, it’s usually necessary to configure a larger number of beacons for rollout. Configuration includes settings such as the iBeacon UUID, major, minor, transmit power and advertising period.

Configuration is usually performed using the beacon manufacturers’ app which can becomes less practical for larger numbers of beacons when you need to connect to each beacon in turn. Larger number of beacons mean they also need to be physically labelled so they can be visually identified.

Pre-setting and labelling is a service we perform that can save you a significant amount of effort and time. The extra cost is negligible for larger numbers of beacons.

Eddystone-TLM

Eddystone-TLM is a data format defined by Google, using standard Bluetooth LE advertising, that can be detected on all receiving Bluetooth LE devices such as Android and iOS devices, desktops, laptops, Bluetooth gateways and single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi.

‘TLM’ signifies that it is providing telemetry of a device:

The battery voltage is in millivolts and defaults to zero if not supported by the device.

The temperature is in degrees Celsius using signed 8.8 fixed-point notation and defaults to -128°C if not supported by the device. For devices such as temperature sensor beacons, the TLM temperature is the System on a Chip (SoC) die temperature, not the temperature sensor for which you will need to decode a different advertising frame.

ADV_CNT is the number of advertisement frames sent since the device started and SEC_CNT is the time since device power up. These can be used to infer time and duration.

There’s no device identification in the advertising to uniquely tie the telemetry to a device so Google recommends:

TLM should be interleaved with an identifying (advertising) frame such as Eddystone-UID or Eddystone-EID

However, the additional advertising could equally be iBeacon. All Bluetooth LE receiving devices also receive a Bluetooth MAC address that is visible on all devices apart from iOS. For many sensing scenarios, an additional identifying advertising frame isn’t required.

View Eddystone Beacons

Restaurant of the Future

With restaurants and pubs here in the UK scrambling to reopen this weekend, they need to find ways to provide self-service and minimise contact with staff. It’s interesting to see what was considered a ‘future restaurant’ in 2014 makes much more sense today:

The concept restaurant at Eggcellent in Tokyo used iBeacons for the location aspects together with smartglasses, augmented reality and gesture interfaces. An Engadget article covered the restaurant in more detail.

Read about Using Beacons in Hospitality

USB Beacons for Fixed Installations

Beacons are often placed in shops, offices and other buildings for detection in smartphone apps. Battery powered beacons last from months to years depending on the size of the battery and the transmission power (adjustable). The compromise between battery life and physical range can be avoided if USB beacons are used instead.

USB beacons are powered from an available wallsocket, laptop, desktop or other standard USB socket. Alternatively, they can be powered using an inexpensive mains charger used to charge a smartphone or other device. Powering from the mains allows the beacon to be permanently set to full power with no worry about checking or changing the battery.

The use of mains power also allows for use of specialist beacons that output the maximium legally allowed (Class 1) power that wouldn’t be feasible using battery power.

The FSC-BP109 can be received up to 1000m on Android and 4000m on iOS.

View USB beacons

Measuring Occupancy for Social Distancing

Governments are increasingly mandating workplace indoor occupancy limits due to the Coronavirus pandemic. This is especially so in education where the risk of reduced social distancing is being mitigated with occupancy limits.

Occupancy is the number of people that are currently inside a building, room or zone. Measuring occupancy manually requires significant effort, additional staff, is error prone and is difficult to achieve, especially when there are multiple entrances and exits.

It’s for this reason, we are seeing organisations starting to use automated approaches. Real time locating systems (RTLS) such as our BeaconRTLS™ use Bluetooth beacons on people and gateways in rooms/zones to track who is where. The resultant data provides for accurate current and historical occupancy.

Once you have a system in place it has lots of other uses:

Finding people
Locating staff for safety and evacuation
Finding expensive assets shared amongst staff
Providing alerts if things move when they shouldn’t
Detecting when collisions occur between vehicles/racking
Tracing of parts, sub-assemblies and physical orders
Supporting IoT sensing including light, temperature, humidity, water leak, gas
Creating big data for use with AI to provide insights using patterns the data

Making More Sense of Bluetooth Advertising Scans

When working with Bluetooth beacons and/or gateways and looking at raw Bluetooth data it can often become confusing which device is which. When setting up beacons using manufacturers’ apps, it’s a common occurrence for our customers to mistakenly connect to smartphones or fitness trackers rather than a beacon and wonder why the connection doesn’t work.

RaMBLE is a useful Android app that helps decode the Bluetooth devices around you. It attempts to classify devices so you can identify them:

The scanning runs in background and also logs advertising so that the data can be exported for analysis.

Bluetooth Gateways for AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub and Google IoT Core

It never been easier to collect Bluetooth sensor information and store it in the cloud. The INGICS gateways come with step-by-step instructions how to set up AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub and Google IoT Core.

View Bluetooth Sensor Beacons

UK NHS Covid-19 Contact Tracking Source Code Available

The UK NHS has just released the Android and iOS source code for the UK NHS Covid-19 contact tracking app. This is the code used before the recent switch to the Google/Apple mechanism.

The iOS readme explains how it works:

Our unique identifier is also known as our service characteristic. In the Bluetooth spec, devices can broadcast the availability of services. Each service can have multiple characteristics. We use a characteristic to uniquely identify our service and distinguish from all other sorts of Bluetooth devices. For every device we find with a matching characteristic, we record an identifier for the device we saw, the timestamp, and the RSSI of the Bluetooth signal, which will allow a team later on to determine who was in close proximity to individuals infected with the novel coronavirus

Indigo Mac Home Automation Uses iBeacons

One of our customers McPartners in the Netherlands has been using piBeacon with Indigo to provide for home automation on the Mac. You can read their success story on the Indigo forums.

They started using beacon instead of RFID because RFID cards they were using were becoming more expensive than iBeacons and becoming scarce. They wanted tags they could second source, have a long battery life, long range and easy setup.

They have found the Indigo/piBeacon combination reliable, fast and have told us it works with all the Axaet, AnkhMaway and Minew beacons purchased from us.

Mist WiFi Access Points Broadcast as Bluetooth Beacons

WiFi access points are increasingly supporting the broadcast of Bluetooth beacon signals. The main usecase is to allow for smartphone apps to detect the Bluetooth advertising and provide for location based information and navigation.

We recently learnt that Mist access points support the advertising of iBeacon and Eddystone:

There are also some interesting uses in retail that automatically provision smartphone WiFi access settings based on the detected presence of a beacon.