iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
There’s a new video that shows beacons being used with AR to provide up to x10 extra accuracy:
The software being used is ViewAR which provides a platform-independent Augmented Reality system and SDK supporting systems such as ARKit, ARCore, and Wikitude. Contact ViewAR for early beta access.
If you are developing a beacon solution it can be tricky to set up physical scenarios where beacons come and go. Peter Alt of Philadelphia Museum of Art has a useful iOS app called BeaconWalker that simulates a sequence of iBeacons with custom durations per beacon.
The Swift source code is also available on GitHub. While you are there also take a look at the museum’s mobile framework, a collection of utilities for caching data, iBeacon ranging and indoor navigation. There’s also framework demo that explains how the framework features work.
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 includes:
There’s a new in-depth article at PC Mag on how Carnival use beacons, based on Bluetooth and NFC, on cruise ships. As the article says, “it provides an excellent case study in how to use technology to enhance your customer’s experience”.
The beacons are branded as ‘OceanMedallion’ and allow:
7,000 sensors throughout each ship detect the beacons and 4000 interactive portals provide information for guests. A mobile app can also be used that can help navigate about the ship and find fellow passengers.
Beacons provide a way to eliminate friction in the passenger experience. The software system uses edge devices to perform operations close to where the user has been detected so as to reduce latency and network traffic. Nevertheless, the system attempts to centralise data so as not to replicate information.
The system provides Carnival with lots of useful data on guest preferences, transactions (for billing) and preferred areas of the ship. Aggregated information might be used to determine heavily used areas (for maintenance), pinch points and redundant areas of the ship to feed into improvements to the ship.
Read about Beacons in Hospitality
Read about Beacons in Visitor Spaces
Since our original post on power measurement in 2016, we have been occasionally providing power measurement services as part of consultancy. Last week we started offering it as separate service orderable via our web store.
We take a beacon the same as yours, or one you send to us, and measure the actual power use with your specific settings.
Note, however, that if you will be using batteries that have been included with beacons, those batteries will have been used for an indeterminate time in the factory for soak testing the beacon. You will need to use new batteries to obtain the maximum battery life.
ez enRoute uses iBeacons to provide a student and bus tracking system with push notifications, mapping and driver SOS.
Read about using beacons for transportation and education.
ez enRoute has been added to the BeaconZone Solutions Directory.
There’s a relatively new Raspberry Pi Python Beacon Scanner on GitHub.
The scanner can detect both iBeacon and Eddystone beacons.
There’s useful new research on Wireless Mesh Networking: An IoT-Oriented Perspective Survey on Relevant Technologies by Antonio Cilfone, Luca Davoli, Laura Belli and Gianluigi Ferrari of University of Parma, Italy. It covers how various communication technologies are suitable for mesh networking.
The paper explains mesh topologies and routing protocols. It describes Bluetooth:
“BLE is presently raising more and more attention and is becoming one of the leading technologies for both IoT-oriented and industrial scenarios”
The authors provide an in-depth introduction to SIG Bluetooth Mesh. (Note that an excellent higher level overview also very recently became available from InsightSIP). The research paper also mentions other Bluetooth mesh implementations such as the draft IETF Bluetooth Mesh for IPv6.
Applications such as smart city, industrial monitoring and smart agriculture are considered and factors such as interoperability and security are mentioned. Finally, the paper compares other protocols such as Thread, ZigBee and LoRaWAN.
Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh
When scanning for Bluetooth devices from an app or gateway you will usually pick up lots of iOS devices.
Every Bluetooth LE device, including iOS, has a unique MAC address. MAC address randomization is used on iOS so it’s not possible to track a particular device over time. However, there have been studies that have shown other Bluetooth information can be used to fingerprint devices.
The Bluetooth advertising uses a proprietary protocol and has no use for anyone other than Apple. The advertising is used to provide for what are called continuity messages that allow handoff of tasks, such as writing email, universal clipboard, making calls from a another Apple device, instant hotspot, auto unlock from Apple watch and photo transfer between Apple devices.
An iPhone only advertises if it is associated with an iCloud account to which at least two devices are registered. Advertising can be manually turned off in the Settings Menu. Disabling Bluetooth from the Control Center does not stop the transmission of continuity messages.
It’s surprising iOS devices advertise so often, even when continuity messages aren’t being used, because it uses a lot of battery power. This must be the cost of being able to provide the app handoff messages without the user having to initiate a manual action at both ends. Maybe Apple will be able to overlay the new ‘Find My’ messages in same or similar Bluetooth advertising so as to make best use of the battery.
There’s new research Exploring Bluetooth Beacon Use Cases in Teaching and Learning: Increasing the Sustainability of Physical Learning Spaces that reviews selected use cases of Bluetooth beacons in educational situations.
The paper covers attendance monitoring, smart campus operation, dissemination of educational content to students and the use of augmented reality (AR) combined with beacons.
Read about Beacons in Education