The authors discuss the use of beacons vs RFID and create a system using Received Signal Strength Indicator RSSI and gateways connected to detector mats:
Beacons are carried by athletes. The gateways sync their times via NTP and send data up to a MongoDB database:
An accuracy of ±156 ms was achieved which compares well to the nearest second used to generally record times and resolution accuracy of 0.1s for commercial transponder timing systems.
Nordic, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) in many beacons, has the latest issue of Wireless Quarter Magazine. It showcases the many uses of Nordic SoCs.
News from the world of beacons and Bluetooth LE includes:
National Instruments (NI) vibration sensor enables condition monitoring of industrial plant and machinery.
IDC research that says commercial and consumer adoption of IoT will drive worldwide annual spending to $1.1 trillion by 2023
Brain cells controlled using Bluetooth LE
Researchers build millimeter scale Bluetooth LE antenna
Quuppa’s direction finding technology used for ice hockey
The paper starts by giving an overview of fingerprinting. It explains how fingerprinting is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Fingerprinting is affected by:
A problem is that some environment-related factors change over time, such as changes in hardware/furniture, the presence of people and ambient humidity conditions meaning that fingerprinting isn’t a one-off activity.
The researchers conclude that the highest transmission power (+4 dBm) produces the best location accuracy. However, this uses a lot of battery power. Use of the lowest power (−20 dBm) only worsened the accuracy by 11.8%. Similarly, lowering the density of the beacons by around 50%, the error increase was only about 9.2%. Increasing the advertising interval didn’t have a significant impact on the accuracy.
The affect of beacon orientation was assessed and vertical orientation was found to be best. As expected, introducing a slight electrical noise during the positioning phase did not significantly affect accuracy.
Pinpoint is a new platform and app to provide learning, safety and operational tasks to workers. Pin points based on beacons, geofences, QR codes or captured images trigger pre-defined tasks.
A large number of Bluetooth LE apps don’t work on Android 10 because of a bug in permissions in Android 10 (API 29). This affects nearly all manufacturer apps used for setting up beacons or using Bluetooth LE devices. The only apps that will work are those that have very recently been developed and target Android 10.
Android 10 introduced the requirement to have the ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission when targeting (written for) Android 10. Older apps targeting previous versions of Android should not have been affected but, due to a bug, they no longer work.
App developers can make their app work by adding the permission. Note that the permission must also also be prompted for from the user using the request permission mechanism. Alternatively the user can set manually via Settings -> Apps & Notifications -> Your App Name -> Permissions.
If you are a user and need to use a particular app then you will need to use a device having an Android version prior to Android 10. Alternatively, use the iOS app version if possible.
This issue has been has been detected by us on build QP1A.190711.020 and QP1A.191005.007.A1 and is perhaps related to issue 136774949. We expect it to be fixed in the future via an Android OS update.
There’s recent research into using iBeacons with intelligent displaying and alerting systems (SICIAD) typically found in public buildings and offices. The paper An Intelligent Low-Power Displaying System with Integrated Emergency Alerting Capability by Marius Vochin, Alexandru Vulpe, Laurentiu Boicescu, Serban Georgica Obreja and George Suciu of the University of Bucharest shows how beacons can be used to determine indoor position of mobile terminals or signalling points of interest.
An Android app uses the beacons to detect location and sends it to the SICIAD system. The researchers concluded that:
“By using an appropriate number of beacons and optimal positions, a relatively precise indoor localization can be obtained with iBeacon technology”
When testing beacons and Bluetooth LE, nRF Connect is usually sufficient. However, if you need deeper analysis of Bluetooth you need to use a packet sniffer.
NCC Group has a new open source sniffer for Bluetooth 5 that also works with Bluetooth 4.x. You need to run the software on a Texas Instruments (TI) CC26x2 board.
We have been involved in writing some articles for a new magazine site Industry 4.0 SME.
The site is targeted at CEOs, COOs, CTOs and innovation managers in Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs). It provides high level articles on the opportunities, strategies and technologies involved in Industry 4.0. It’s updated daily with the latest Industry 4.0 news.
Bluetooth Framework is a library for using Bluetooth on Windows. There are editions for .NET, c++ and VCL. While the framework has many features, those of particular interest to Bluetooth LE developers are:
Enumerating and managing local Bluetooth radios
Searching for remote Bluetooth enabled devices
Measuring RSSI
Bluetooth LE (BLE) GATT profile client
Monitor Bluetooth LE beacons: Proximity beacon (iBeacon), Alt Beacon and Eddystone Beacons
