iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
There’s a Bluetooth security vulnerability story doing the rounds that, according to the security researchers:
…affects basically all devices that “speak Bluetooth”
This isn’t true. The vulnerability relates to Bluetooth BR/EDR, so called ‘Classic Bluetooth’, and not Bluetooth LE. It isn’t found in beacons or other devices communicating via Bluetooth LE. It also isn’t found in Bluetooth mesh.
Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh
There’s a new solution to track cleaning staff that provides app and web source code to implement a cleaning staff tracking system using iBeacons:
Manage beacons, buildings, zones and broadcast messages. The web interface shows staff activity and allows staff to be assigned to tasks. Staff can update task status and provide notes from their smartphones.
This solution has been added to the BeaconZone Solutions Directory where you can find more solutions that work with generic beacons.
Silicon Labs have a useful web site, webinar and slides on “Benchmarking Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, and Zigbee Network Performance”.
The two main measures of performance are throughput, the rate data transfer that can be achieved (in bits per second) and latency, the time taken for data to cross the network.
With a typical implementation of 6+ hops, throughput converges to a similar order of magnitude for all the protocols:
In real use these protocols only support of the order of low thousands of bits (not bytes!) per sec and should therefore only be used for sending small amounts of data that don’t change very often.
For a small payload with 192 nodes, Zigbee has lowest latency and Bluetooth has greatest variation of latency of 20ms to 200ms:
For a larger payload, the Bluetooth latency has a larger range of up to 750ms:
Whether the variation of latency matters depends on your particular solution. Which technology is best depends on what you need to accomplish. For example, in a Bluetooth lighting scenario you might not want some lights to come on immediately and far ones to come on up to a second later. For sensing, the delay usually doesn’t matter.
You also need to consider other factors such as interoperability, scalability, security, reliability and ease of deployment. For example, Zigbee is less scalable and Silicon Labs recommends a maximum of seven hops otherwise the network becomes congested due to re-tries. Bluetooth has especially good interoperability because it is ubiquitous on smartphones and other devices. It also works reliably in industrial situations and has double encryption.
All protocols can be difficult to deploy due to the lack of off-the-shelf general solutions outside specific verticals such as lighting and home automation.
Silicon Labs have a more specific paper on Bluetooth Mesh Network Performance.
Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh
We now have the Minew D15N beacon in stock. It’s small, attractive, wearable beacon with a range up to 50m.
It advertises up to 6 channels that can be iBeacon, Eddystone UID, Eddystone URL, Eddystone TLM and device info.
We have two new variants of the Minew S1 sensor beacon in stock. The first is the same as the temperature/humidity S1 but adds an accelerometer.
The second, the S1T has a temperature probe to allow sensing away from the beacon but doesn’t have the humidity nor acceleration sensors.
We sometimes get asked if it’s possible to send custom advertising. All Bluetooth advertising is based on Bluetooth standards and our post on the Cheat Sheet shows some examples such as iBeacon and Eddystone.
The first question is why you might want to send your own advertising. Using the iBeacon or Eddystone protocol is sufficient in the majority of cases where you just want to a unique id at the Bluetooth LE receiver (usually but not always an app or gateway). The most common case of custom advertising is sensor beacons that need to send their own sensor data.
Nevertheless, some projects use custom advertising that signifies something extra other than a unique id. This is project specific and might, for example, indicate something about location, asset or person. Very few beacons support custom advertising without full re-programming (as opposed to setup). Re-programming involves replacing the SoC firmware and is a significant undertaking. Some of the MeeBlue beacons support setup of a custom channel that can contain any data.
There’s a useful tool called bettercap that claims to be the “Swiss Army knife for WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy, wireless HID hijacking and Ethernet networks reconnaissance and MITM attacks”.
While you might want to use it to test Bluetooth LE security, a more interesting use is for debugging Bluetooth LE. If you are scanning for advertising or creating or using GATT, for example with a beacon, it’s sometimes useful to have a separate way of exercising Bluetooth LE.
Bettercap is written in Go and runs on GNU/Linux, BSD, Android, Apple macOS and the Microsoft Windows. However, a bug in Windows and macOS prevents the Bluetooth commands from working. Hence, it’s for Linux or Android only.
Better caps runs in the browser and you can create scripts.
UPDATE: There’s a tutorial on Medium.
Dialog Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the SoC chip in some beacons, has an informative article on How Bluetooth Mesh and IIoT are Reimagining Factories and Warehouses. It explains how the recent introduction of Bluetooth mesh has created new opportunities in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
“The manufacturing industry is absolutely ripe for potential with Bluetooth mesh”
IDC
“Industrial sensors and smart buildings among other use cases, are expected to outpace the overall Bluetooth LE market by 3X through 2022”
Research and Markets
The article mentions preventive maintenance, air quality sensing, asset tracking, robot control systems and traditional air conditioning as possible applications for Bluetooth Mesh. However, a key insight is that once a mesh network is in place it can be used for applications beyond those originally envisaged.
Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh
We have re-implemented our Beacon Solutions Directory making it easier to use and more up to date:
We have removed listings for solutions that no longer exist, updated solutions that have changed focus and added some newer solutions that use generic beacons.
We found that a considerable number of marketing/retail solutions no longer exist and only the stronger ones remain. This is mainly due to the demise of Eddystone URL.
There’s an upsurge in checkin/checkout solutions presumably partly due to recent ruling by the European Court of Justice that said that EU companies must have something in place to provide an “objective, reliable and accessible system” that allows the duration of time worked each day to be measured.
The use of beacons in visitor spaces is also a growing area with solutions ranging from single use kiosks to event management platforms.
Generally, support for beacons is being added to existing, mature solutions rather than, as previously, new solutions being created solely around beacon functionality.
The Bluetooth SIG has a useful video on Engineering Tomorrow’s Connected Construction Site.
Bosch’s IoT and Mobile Lead NA, Eli Share explains how stakeholders need to concentrate on the value proposition. They also need to work with ecosystem partners to realise solutions.