Author: Support

4 Ways Beacons are Being Used to Fight the Covid Pandemic

  • Staff Locating – While our BeaconRTLS™ was previously mainly used in factories and warehouses, it is now being used more to determine the location of staff and occupancy of buildings. What might have seemed to be an invasion of privacy is now seen as something desirable to help ensure the safety of workers and audit compliance to industry-specific guidelines.
  • Social Distancing – Stand alone social distancing devices and tracking systems are helping companies get back to work and stay open.
  • Lone Working – There has been an increase in the use of beacons providing touch-free ‘check-in’ for workers and for SOS.
  • Cafes and Restaurants – Beacons are increasingly being used to identify tables for use in app-based ordering of food.

Farm Management with Bluetooth Sensors

There’s new research by the Universities of Salento Italy and Panamericana Mexico on the Development of Sensors-Based Agri-Food Traceability System Remotely Managed by a Software Platform for Optimized Farm Management.

It demonstrates the use of IoT to revolutionise farming. A system was implemented to provide for:

  • Optimum water and fertiliser use
  • Better quality and yield of crops
  • Increased safety
  • Reduction in production costs
  • Reduction in negative impacts on the health and environment
  • Smart traceability

Sensors allow calibration of irrigation and fertilisation based on crop type, growth phase, soil and environmental conditions. The traceability allows monitoring of the movements of food products from the field, through storage to end consumers.

Bluetooth LE sensor tags are used for monitoring conditions during storage and transportation so as to assess freshness, integrity, as well as to provide for traceability.

The system enables enables management strategies that anticipate or delay crop collection, fine tuning the irrigation/fertilisation timing based on customers’ requests. This allows farmers to achieve economic benefits and reduce agri-food waste.

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Bluetooth Standards Pros and Cons

Here at BeaconZone we create solutions based on products that use Bluetooth LE. The Bluetooth standards are created and maintained by the Bluetooth SIG. This post briefly explores the advantages and disadvantages of such standards and the opportunities and risks of going off-piste using 3rd party wireless standards.

The main advantage of the Bluetooth LE standard is interoperability. We can use beacons, sensor beacons, smartphones, gateways, single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi, laptops and desktops in solutions and be sure they can communicate using Bluetooth LE. More specifically, we can use the Bluetooth APIs on these platforms and they speak a common language and ‘just work’. Bluetooth has also recently introduced standards on top of the Bluetooth LE standard that provide for mesh networking and angle based location.

The Bluetooth LE standard has caused the ecosystem of System on a Chip (SoC) vendors such as Texas Instruments, Nordic Semiconductor and Dialog Semiconductor to create inexpensive sub-systems and SDKs that simplify implementing new products based on the standards. This, in turn, has created a large variety of devices that can talk to each other even though they use hardware from different vendors. The variety of devices has increased competition, keeping device prices down.

The problem with standards is that they evolve very slowly and might not be optimal for specific situations. This creates an opportunity for 3rd parties to create alternative wireless solutions such as Ultra Wideband (UWB) devices, custom mesh networking and custom location schemes that can provide better performance in aspects such as accuracy, physical range and battery life. These custom products cost more because they are more involved to create/manufacture and their unique features can command a higher price. However, there’s the risk that if/when the companies producing these products go out of business, your solution will become end-of-life with no second sourcing. This is a particular risk when the product involves some sort of software as a service (SAAS), irrespective of standards.

Choosing a wireless technology for your solution involves a trade off between performance, cost and risk. It’s wise to first seek a standards-based and stand-alone (not SAAS) approach and only deviate if you find what you need to do isn’t served by available solutions.

New Bluetooth Beacons

We have two new beacons in stock:

The S1 is a USB beacon advertising iBeacon, Eddystone UID and Eddystone URL.

The H1 is a waterproof, rechargeable wristband beacon advertising iBeacon, Eddystone UID and Eddystone URL. It also has an accelerometer that can be used to provide for motion triggered broadcast. The front has a capacitive button that can be used to turn on/off or to only advertise when the button is pressed.

Both have the rare facility to send custom Bluetooth LE advertising that some customers use when they don’t want their beacons to show up other systems.

View All Bluetooth Beacons

Bluetooth LE (BLE) Real Time Locating System (RTLS) API

Our BeaconRTLS™ locates valuable plant tools in manufacturing/construction and tracks parts and sub-assemblies. In healthcare it tracks high value equipment, monitors the location and temperature of medicines and saves time searching for equipment and monitoring vulnerable patients. For smart buildings, it tracks valuable assets, monitors lone workers and automatically locates people or students for safety and evacuation.

When we designed v2 of BeaconRTLS™ we purposely omitted any reporting. While the system creates alerts for situations such as area entry/exit, unexpected movement and missing assets there are no text or pdf based reports. For v1, we found that each customer needed different output reporting data. Some needed textual reports, others pdfs, Excel or electronic links to other systems. Some needed current information, historical, special subsets or calculated data. The required data also tends to change over time. For example, room occupancy has recently become important due to the Covid pandemic.

Instead of fixed reports, all the data in the system is open and accessible via a HTTP REST API which makes the system very flexible. Open doesn’t mean insecure because the API can use SSL (https) and authentication (needs a special key to access). We can create reports and part of your solution but it’s simple enough that we find many customers are able to do this themselves. The BeaconRTLS™ user guide provides examples how to use the REST API.

The BeaconRTLS™ API can be used from generic report writers such as jsreport, Jasper and other report writers. Excel Power Query , that comes free with Excel, is useful as it allows importing of data into Excel using a HTTP REST query which can be set up to automatically refresh every so often. Once in Excel, there’s a huge number of ways data can be re-formatted, combined, filtered, presented and forwarded.

The main output information in BeaconRTLS is provided as BeaconLocation data that has the following format:

{
"dateTime": "2020-07-10T10:56:42.809Z",
"RSSI": 0,
"beaconMACAddress": "string",
"gatewayMACAddress": "string",
"beaconType": "string",
"beaconColour": "string",
"beaconLabelAttributes": "string",
"temperature": 0,
"humidity": 0,
"accelerationX": 0,
"accelerationY": 0,
"accelerationZ": 0,
"batteryPercentage": 0,
"batteryVoltage": 0,
"magneticSwitch": true,
"moving": "string",
"proximity": true,
"airPressure": 0,
"lightLevel": 0,
"buttonPress": true,
"id": "string",
"beaconId": "string",
"nearestGatewayId": "string",
"areaId": "string"
}
]

For example, the following REST query fetches the beacon, gateway and time for most recent 20 beaconlocations:

http://<your ip or domain/api/beaconlocations?filter[fields][beaconMACAddress]=true&filter[fields][gatewayMACAddress]=true&filter[fields][dateTime]=true&filter[limit]=20&filter[order]=dateTime%20DESC

Putting this into Excel Power Query gets the data directly into Excel.

Read about BeaconRTLS™

Social Distance Wristbands Help Keep Sites Operating

As offices and sites re-open and people go back to work, it’s necessary to introduce social distancing measures in the workplace. We are hearing of factories being shut down after site-specific infection. Poor social distancing measures ultimately jeopardises the continuity of work in your organisation.

No matter what measures you put in place there will be some workers who flout the guidelines and others who are so engrossed in work that they forget about social distancing.

Social distance wristbands and lanyard wearable devices remind workers to maintain social distancing. Complete solutions allow close contact events to be taken off the distance wristband each day to audit compliance and if necessary, perform contact tracing.

Read about Social Distance Wristbands for Workplace Social Distancing and Contact Tracing

System for Searching Factory Stock

A common problem in factories is manual searching for stock for input to manufacturing. Stock is usually stored in boxes or pallets and can be in one of many rooms, warehouses or might already be somewhere on the factory floor. A large amount of stock arrives and leaves every day leading to logistical challenges keeping up with the whereabouts of goods. Timely delivery of components or sub-assemblies is critical to ensure smooth flowing of production and making best use of factory resources.

Manual paper-based processes are extremely inefficient and prone to human error. Old fashioned RFID or barcodes are also susceptible to error because data is only as up to date as the last scan and a recent scan might not have occurred.

Bluetooth is an ideal technology for solving this problem because it provides real-time location. We previously wrote about the advantages of using beacons in industry and how Bluetooth is suitable for use on the electrically noisy factory floor.

We offer multiple solutions for tracking stock and can adapt them to your exact needs, for example integrating with your existing systems. Once you have a tracking system in place you can use it for extra purposes such as locating jobs/work orders, monitoring machine/people capacity and providing for location based instruction/tasks. Sensing open/closed, on/off and quantities such as temperature and vibration enables diagnostics, monitoring and prognostics.

Read about Asset and Pallet Tracking for Manufacturers

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