Author: Support

Apple, WWDC and Bluetooth

While some people were hoping for an ‘iBeacon version 2’ and there were rumours of a new Apple ultra wideband locating system, neither were announced at WWDC 2019. Instead, the Bluetooth news centred around the ability to use Bluetooth to find Apple devices, even when they aren’t online and even when they aren’t nearby.

Some news outlets have described this as a Bluetooth mesh network made up of all other iOS/Mac devices which is misleading and will lead to unfortunate confusion with the official Bluetooth SIG mesh. Instead, as Apple described, the system is much like the tracker ’tile’ type beacons that have apps that report in all seen beacons to a central server. If someone else’s device sees your device then you can find your device.

The difference to tile-like beacons is that the servers belong to Apple, the Bluetooth advertising is proprietary (and hence anonymous to eavesdroppers) and devices are acting as beacons. It’s interesting how, or if, Apple has done this without impacting both your iPhone battery life and the battery life of all iPhones scanning for beacons. The Bluetooth advertising must be very infrequent.

Privacy conscious people might also observe that this also gives a new way for Apple to know the location of Apple devices and proximity between devices. We wonder whether this will be ‘on’ by default for all users, opt in or opt out? Privacy matters aside, always knowing the proximity between Apple devices allows Apple to provide for some interesting possible future usecases.

UPDATE: There’s a new article in Wired explaining how the mechanism is end to end encrypted. This means Apple doesn’t know where your device is and, by implication, won’t be able to implement the possible ‘future usecases’ I alluded to.

Clearing the Android Bluetooth Cache

In our post on compatibility we explained how Bluetooth LE connection problems are more likely to be with Android rather than the devices (beacons) with which they are communicating.

If you are experiencing such problems you can try clearing your Android Bluetooth cache:

Settings
Select Application Manager
Display system apps (swipe left/right or choose from the menu in the top right corner)
Select Bluetooth
Select Storage
Tap Clear Cache
Restart the phone

Note that these menus are not available on the latest versions of (vanilla, non-OEM) Android because Google has unhelpfully removed access to system apps.

Rail Passenger Interface Using iBeacons

EAO AG, a company specialising in human machine interfaces, has a new train passenger interface that provides phone charging and information services.

The information services use iBeacon locating to allow train operating companies to provide added value services such as journey information, ticket validation and refreshments requests. The wireless USB phone charging fits onto seats and the iBeacon is detected in mobile apps.

“The iBeacon in each Passenger Interface also transmits a code to the passenger’s travel app, while the cloud translates the code into a carriage and seat number, making seat reservations easier to track and helping make passengers’ journeys more connected than ever”

Read about Beacons in Transportation

Guide to Bluetooth Security

We occasionally get asked about the specifics of Bluetooth LE security. This is usually when a project has security requirements or needs to formally document things such as cryptography schemes and vulnerabilities.

The U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has an informative Guide to Bluetooth Security (pdf) that provides information on the security features of Bluetooth, vulnerabilities, threats and extensive recommendations.

The following table provides an overview of Bluetooth LE compared ‘Classic’ Bluetooth Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) protocol:

Bluetooth LE 4.2 and later uses ECDH P-256 Elliptic Curve public key cryptography for protection against passive eavesdropping and man in the middle (MITM) during pairing.

While it’s good for projects to be aware of the underlying mechanisms and their limitations, we find that, in practice, security threats and weaknesses tend to be related more to how Bluetooth LE is used (by software) on a particular project rather than Bluetooth implementation itself.

How to Start Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation

There’s lots said about the advantages of Industry 4.0 or Digital Transformation and the associated new technologies but it’s a lot harder to apply this to the context of a business that has legacy equipment and no real way of knowing where to start.

Our previous article on productivity explained how, historically, digital transformation has been only been implemented in the top 5% ‘frontier’ companies. These have tended to be very large companies with large R&D budgets that have enabled customised digital solutions. More recently, the availability of less expensive sensors and software components have extended opportunities to the SME companies. These companies are already realising gains in profitability, customer experience and operational efficiency. Unlike previous technologies, such as CRM, the newer technologies such as IoT and AI are more transformative. Companies that don’t update their processes risk being outranked by their competition with a greater possibility of going out of business. But where do you start?

The place to start is not technology but instead something you and your colleagues fortunately have lots of experience of : Your company. Take an honest look at your processes and work out the key problems that, if solved, would achieve the greatest gains. You might have ignored problems or inefficiencies for years or decades because they were thought to be insolvable. Technology might now be able to solve some of these problems. So what kind of problems? Think in terms of bottlenecks, costly workrounds, human effort-limited tasks, stoppages, downtimes, process delays, under-used equipment and even under-used people. Can you measure these things and react? Can you predict they are about to happen? This is where sensing comes in.

The next stage is connectivity. You will almost certainly need to upgrade or expand your WiFi and/or Ethernet network. It can be impractical to put sensors on everything and everyone and connect everything by WiFi/Ethernet. Instead, consider Bluetooth LE and sensor beacons to provide a low cost, low power solution for the last 50 to 100m. Bluetooth mesh can provide site-wide connectivity.

Initially implement a few key improvements that offer good payback for the effort (ROI). The improvements in efficiency, productivity, reduced costs and even customer experience should be enough to convince stakeholders to expand and better plan the digital transformation. This involves replacement of inefficient equipment and inefficient processes using, for example, robotics and 3D printing. It also involves analysing higher order information combined from multiple sources and using more advanced techniques such as AI machine learning to recognise and detect patterns to detect, classify and predict. This solves problem complexity beyond that able to be solved by the human mind or algorithmic program created by a programmer.

Get Help Determining Feasibility

Read about Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)

Explore AI Machine Learning with Beacons

Bluetooth LE Supported on Zerynth

There’s a growing number of operating systems for microcontrollers on single board computers, most of which can scan for Bluetooth LE devices such as beacons and connect to them via GATT for setup and extraction of data. Zerynth is now one such OS that you can program using Python.
Zerynth r2.2.0 update allows use of Bluetooth LE.

There’s a new article on Design Bluetooth BLE Applications in Python on ESP32 using Zerynth. The official documentation provides lots of examples.

Bluetooth Beacons in the Rijksmuseum

There’s an interesting post by Eirik Midttun on the the Nordic blog on Bluetooth Beacons in the Rijksmuseum.

BeaconZone’s very first solutions were apps for museums so we know a lot about the possible problems. Eirik comments that the app could be improved as it took a while to detect it was in a new room. He questions whether the beacon advertising was too long. If he was running on iOS, he could be correct. View our article on Choosing an Advertising Interval. If he was on Android it’s more likely that the Bluetooth scanning period and/or time between scans was too long.

Museum apps also tend to suffer from connectivity problems. If the connection was cellular rather than WiFi it might have been taking time to fetch the information associated with the beacon. It’s recommended to have some kind of caching content strategy for museum and visitor space apps where the best user experience is if the app can work offline.

Read about iOS and Android Apps

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DoubleDutch Event Management Platform Uses iBeacons

Today, we learnt that the DoubleDutch event management platform supports iBeacons.

We are discovering more and more apps and platforms are adding support for beacons. Beacons are moving from being the main, usually uncompelling, focus for an app or service to being an adjunct to provide for, much more useful, location specific functionality.

DoubleDutch allows location and time based messages can be set up for events. This works with all iBeacons.

View iBeacons

Edge Computing on the Rise

Strategy Analytics have a new press release on Edge Computing on the Rise in IoT Deployments. Edge computing is where data is processed close to where it originates for better network use, reduced traffic/storage and faster detection/notification times. Strategy Analytics end user research shows that 44% of companies are currently using edge computing, in some form, in their deployments.

Read about SensorCognition™, our Edge gateway with machine learning.