iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
There’s new research on a An Intelligent Low-Power Displaying System with Integrated Emergency Alerting Capability. The authors have implemented a wireless ePaper system showing static and dynamic information together with indoor locating based on Bluetooth beacons .
Unfortunately, the locating system is based on an empty room and the technique would be liable to fluctuations in the physical environment.
Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)
We have two new beacons in stock in the INGICS range:
The iGS04 is a new keyring/keyfob style beacon only 6mm thin. It advertises continuously and the button is used to change a value in the advertising data.
The iGS01 is similar to our other iGS beacons except it has no sensors other than the being able to detect the button press.
These Bluetooth beacons are not iBeacon nor Eddystone beacons. The advertising data is instead wholly used for sensor data. You will need an (your own) app or gateway to scan and obtain the advertising data.
There are lots of Bluetooth LE scanning apps but RaMBLE for Android stands out because it does a great job of trying to identify the type of Bluetooth LE device. It also plots the detected location onto a map that can be useful for some scenarios.
Read about iOS and Android Apps
Customers are increasingly expecting very high levels of customer service at car dealerships. This is very difficult to achieve due to the high levels of manpower needed, especially at the start and end of the day, as service staff search for customers’ cars.
On the sales side, some customers end up waiting to be seen (or leave) while others, usually millennials, expect better self-help information to better inform their choice.
There are untapped opportunities to make dealerships much more efficient and improve the customer experience through the use of technology.
Attaching beacons to cars and using apps and Bluetooth gateways solves some of the problems found in dealerships:
Finding cars – A significant amount of time can be wasted manually finding specific cars be they for sale or in for servicing. Sometimes a car might be at one of a few sites or even at a storage site. It might be in use and not be on a site. Cars sometimes block in other cars requiring extra keys to extract. Beacons attached to cars can locate them and adjacent cars in real time.
Providing Sales Information – Beacons attached to cars for sale can be used with apps to provide information and capture leads when the salesperson is busy or the dealership is closed. They provide a way for customers to continue the buying process when they have left the site and extend the showroom to their homes and workplaces. There are also opportunities to extend marketing to customers’ friends and family through social sharing.
Providing Servicing Information – Dealerships get very busy at the start and end of the day when customers drop off and pick up their vehicles. Apps and Bluetooth gateways and web sites can be used to provide automated information, based on location, as to the progress of servicing thus relieving staff of answering phone calls.
Once you have a beacon network in place collecting data you can perform more advanced analysis such as identifying cars for sale that haven’t moved for a long time, popular cars and unpopular cars. You can gather information on service time, throughput and productivity.
Read about using Beacons for Marketing
Learn about BeaconRTLS™
Read about Complete Solutions
Tracking loaded pallets saves a significant amount of time, effort and hence cost in logistics and manufacturing. Pallets might contain stock, components or sub-assemblies. The top usecase is finding a particular pallet quickly. However, sensing need not be limited to pallets. Extending tracking to forklifts, racking and even people provides additional business benefits. For example, we have previously been asked to provide for the following scenarios:
“I need to ensure best use of my forklifts. Tell me when one hasn’t moved for 2 minutes.”
“I need to know if a forklift has crashed into racking.”
“I run a warehouse containing hazardous materials. If evacuation is needed, I need to know everyone has evacuated the building even if someone has temporarily gone off site”
These situations, and more, are solvable using Bluetooth beacons (In terms of asset tracking, beacons are sometimes called tags).
RFID and barcodes can also be used for tracking. However, the information is only as good as the last scan that might have been a long time ago after which the asset might have moved without being scanned. The advantage of beacons is that they repeatedly advertise so the information is always up to date.
Further advantages of Bluetooth tags are:
Software such as our BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™ can be used to track what’s where over time, create notifications and integrate with your existing systems.
Once you have some current and historical data you can also start to do clever things such as automatically detecting and predicting over or under utilisation, finding pinch points or detecting valuable equipment about to be stolen.
Read about Asset Tracking for Manufacturers
Here are the top questions we get asked as a Bluetooth LE developer:
Read about our Bluetooth LE Software Development Services
There’s a 3rd party SensingKit for iOS and Android that came out of the research, SensingKit: Evaluating the Sensor Power Consumption in iOS devices (pdf), by Kleomenis Katevas, Hamed Haddadi, Laurissa Tokarchuk of Queen Mary University of London.
While the SensingKit supports beacons, it only supports them for detecting proximity. The various sensor beacon variants are not supported. SensingKit is best used when you want the smartphone, not the beacon, to do the sensing. It’s useful when you want to mix smartphone sensing with beacon proximity sensing.
In most cases it’s best to use the native Android and iOS SDKs.
Read about our Bluetooth LE Development Services.
Holt Village has launched a new iBeacon Trail that uses the free ‘Explore North East Wales’ app from the Apple and Google app stores. It is one of twelve communities in North East Wales for which a system has been developed to find out more about the community and locations.
The project has been funded by the LEADER scheme which is a fund for rural areas in Wales to explore innovative new approaches and experimental technologies to tackle poverty, create jobs and drive sustainable economic development.
There’s a new research paper by Charles Atherton, School of Education, University of Bristol, UK on Beacons: A tool for 21st Century teaching and learning?
Research took place in a school in the UK in June 2017 using a platform called Studywiz and the eLockers iOS app. It looked into the use of iBeacons to provide for enquiry-based learning, independent learning and individualisation.
The initial description of beacons is misleading:
“Beacons consist of a database inside a plastic casing (see Figure 2). They are ‘pas-sive’ (McDonald & Glover 2016, p. 3) pieces of technology that simply ‘push’ their content to any receptive device.”
This isn’t true. The content lies somewhere else, usually in an app or on a server.
The research found that beacons can be used to allow students to learn at their own pace while relieving teachers to provide move individual tuition. There were technical challenges with local network connectivity and closeness of beacons but these were eventually resolved.
Mr Beacon has a new video interview with Barry McGeough, who has worked with Dr. Martins, North Face and Speedo. He’s the founder and former head of innovation at PVH who work with brands such as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and IZOD.
The interview covers the use of RFID, barcodes and beacons by brands. Brands are increasingly needing to directly connect with consumers to assure them that they are understood. Nevertheless, retailers still control the buying process and are usually the ones to mandate use of asset tracking technologies, usually, for stock control.
The video explains how any retailer or brand using asset tracking technologies needs to make it easy and seamless. Financially, the per-unit cost of the tracking technology is especially important for lower cost commodity items such as underwear.
QR codes are ubiquitous in China and it’s expected some of the techniques will make their way to Western markets. RFID has been successful in retail where it has allowed, for example, stock tracking without having to open boxes.
Latest innovations include ‘smart mirrors’ in changing rooms that can be interacted with to request an item in a different size or find matching items. There are also usecases around checkout, security, anti-counterfeit solutions and end-of-life when it’s required to know the material makeup of an item. Tagging and apps extends the buying process to outside the store to places such as the consumers closet/wardrobe.
The conclusion is not to use technology for technology’s sake and instead invent scenarios that are easy, fun and make use of social interaction.
Read about Beacons for Marketing