Author: Support

Beacons for Smart Malls

As we previously posted, there’s currently a resurgence of the use of beacons in retail. A recent article from Fujitsu says Smart shopping malls thrill visitors, drive profit.

Beacons have been used for years now to trigger offers and information in-store. The beacon marketing ecosystem changed abruptly last November when Google abandoned Nearby smartphone notifications such that all notifications now need an app.

Fujitsu is promoting the merits of having a mall-wide rather than store specific apps. A so called ‘Smart Mall’ can still drive in-store sales through smartphone notifications while at the same time provide increased added value such as mall plans, wayfinding, product comparison and price comparison.

In some ways, getting visitors to download a mall app might be less of a hard sell than downloading an app for each store. This particularly benefits the smaller stores whose apps would never get downloaded.

The data flow can be two way. Shopper movements can be tracked across stores revealing common patterns to aid improvements to flow and identification of dead areas. Sensors can be used to locate and determine the state of equipment, for example letting maintenance staff know when supplies need replenishing. There are also usecases in security preparedness for shoppers, stores and mall security staff.

Explore the Benefits of Beacons

Read What are Beacons

Location Triggered Apps

The use of beacons is maturing. Instead of a product or service being all about beacons, it’s all about something else, usually more domain specific, with beacons providing a valuable adjunct that differentiates the offering.

An example is the Photosync backup and sync app.

It has location based ‘autotransfer’ option, using iBeacons, that allows the app to accurately trigger only at a particular location.

Once beacons are added to a product, it’s often the case that new unforeseen scenarios become evident.

IoT Protocols

Haltian has a useful IoT protocols comparison. It provides a comparison of TE Cat 1, LTE Cat M1, EC-GSM-IoT, NB-Io, Zigbee, SigFox, LoRa, Google Thread, Bluetooth LE and Wirepas Mesh.

Haltian say “It’s is a question of selecting the best-suited option for each use-case at hand”. One thing they don’t say is that the protocols are not mutually exclusive. For example, it’s increasingly the case that more than one protocol is used, one for short on-site distances and another for intra-site communication. WiFi/Ethernet also aren’t mentioned which are often a component of IoT solutions.

Smart Farming with Bluetooth

Smart Farming, also sometimes known as the ‘Third Green Revolution’, is the use of IT to improve profitability, gain efficiency, reduce costs through making better, more optimal decisions and better management control.

Kristoffer Rist Skøien Senior R&D Engineer at Nordic Semiconductor, the making of the SoC in most beacons, has a recent blog post on Feeding the World with Connected Crops. He explains how farmers need to move beyond current precision agriculture (PA) and site specific crop management (SSCM) into more advanced realtime sensing of things such as weather conditions in a specific spot, soil humidity, soil acidity, growth progress and other productivity metrics.

IoT can improve the productivity of farming to improve yields, aid with cost management, waste reduction and automation to create a more efficient and productive business. In the future, this might even combine with autonomous vehicles for watering, fertilising and pesticide application.

There’s need to process significant amounts of data using game-changing business analytics at scale and at speed. Simple feedback mechanisms as well as complex deep learning algorithms can be combined with other, external data sources such as weather, market data or data from other farms. Techniques include benchmarking, analytics, predictive modelling and prognostics to provide models to manage crop failure risk.

A relatively recent paper, Big Data in Smart Farming – A review, covers the issues of extracting meaningful data from farm sensors. It explains the process from sensing and monitoring, through analysis and decision making to intervention with the implications on the efficiency of the entire supply chain. The paper covers the whole ecosystem that extends far from the farm itself:

Smart Farming is still in an early development stage. Current implementations are custom, proprietary solutions that can are experimental and expensive. Solutions need to be affordable, especially for developing countries. However, as with Industry, the early innovators will inevitably gain the early benefits while the laggards will get further left behind.

One way to reduce costs is using standard and open technologies. Bluetooth and more specifically, Bluetooth mesh, offers a low power, low cost, standard way of collecting sensor data. Open software platforms such as OpenATK and initiatives such as FIspace should make solutions more accessible.

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

How is IoT Going?

Vodafone have an informative new report, the Internet of Things (IoT) Barometer. It’s a survey of 1,430 companies worldwide into their use of IoT.

IoT adoption is increasing now that companies are buying more cost-effective, off the-shelf solutions rather than building their own from scratch:

74% of adopters believe that within five years, companies that haven’t adopted IoT will have fallen behind their competition.

Adoption is across all sectors:

“95% of adopters are already seeing benefits. Over half
(52%) say that the returns have been significant and
79% say IoT is enabling positive outcomes that would be
impossible without it.”

The main gains have been:

  • reduced operating costs (53%)
  • improved collection of data (48%)
  • increased revenue from existing streams (42%)

There’s also an accompanying video:

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Bluetooth LE Advertising Channels

Bluetooth LE works at 2.4GHz, the same frequency used for WiFi and microwave ovens! There are two main types of Bluetooth LE transmission: advertising where the device only sends out data and connection-orientated using Generic Attributes (GATT) .

Bluetooth LE uses frequency hopping for increased reliability when there might be noise on a particular channel. When advertising, it uses channels 37, 37 and 39. If subsequently connected, it uses other channels:


Frequency Channels from RF Wireless-World

When only advertising, the transmission is very short of the order of 1 or 2 milliseconds. In between advertising, there is no transmission which is one of the main reasons why Bluetooth LE has very low power use:

Power use over time

Read about Choosing an Advertising Interval

IoT Sensors

Bluetooth LE provides a compelling way of implementing IoT sensing because:

  • The sensors are usually already cased and certified rather than experimentor, bare printed circuit boards.
  • Being wireless, they can be placed in remote areas that have no power.
  • Being Bluetooth LE, they can last on battery power for years.
  • Again, being Bluetooth LE, they are suitable for use in noisy electrical areas.
  • They are commodity rather than proprietary items and hence very low cost compared to legacy industrial sensors.
  • No soldering or wiring up is required.
  • They are easy to interface, for example, to Bluetooth gateways and smartphones.
  • They can participate in Bluetooth Mesh to communicate over large areas.
  • They detect a variety of quantities such as movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate, fall detection, smoke, gas and water leak.
  • They are proven. For example, some of our temperature sensors are used to monitor airline cargo.
  • Software exists, such as BeaconServer™ such that you don’t need to write any software.
INGICS Movement Sensor

Need help? Consider a Feasibility Study.

Beacons for Lone Workers and Workers Under Duress

A critical use for beacons is protecting lone workers or those that might experience duress. Lone worker solutions traditionally used RFID that required workers to manually check-in to locations. If workers forgot or were in trouble you only knew their last location. Newer systems such as Motorola TRBONet used with 2-way radios and BeaconRTLS™ used with generic beacons allow continual tracking of location.

Another usecase related to lone working is warning workers when they are about to enter a hazardous area. An example of this is Lone Worker Solutions’ Safe Beacon feature that creates a virtual perimeter. If a control room needs to know someone has entered (or left) a zone, real time locating systems (RTLS) like BeaconRTLS™ can be used to set up zones with alerts.

It’s also possible to have workers press a button on a beacon as a form of SOS when they are under duress. An example of this is HID Global’s new Badge Beacon that addresses the growing need to protect doctors, nurses and other caregivers from threatening situations that arise in the hospital environment. This can also been done in a generic way by using a RTLS and detecting a beacon button press. Simpler solutions are also possible by having a simple app on the worker’s phone detect the beacon button press and send an alert.

Read about BeaconRTLS™

Consider a Feasibility Study

New iGS01S Bluetooth WiFi Gateway in Stock

We have the new INGICS iGS01S Bluetooth WiFi gateway in stock.

iGS01S with USB power cable

The iGS01S is a new version of the iGS01. It’s functionally compatible with the iGS01 in that you can replace an iGS01 with an iGS01S and it will behave similarly. Hence, it’s also compatible with BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™.

iGS01 gateways allow you to scan for nearby Bluetooth devices and send the scanned data up to a server, including AWS IoT, via TCP, HTTP(S) POST or MQTT.

The main change is the case which the manufacturer has changed to allow commonality of parts with the Ethernet version, the iGS01E.

We also have the matching wall holder in stock.

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)