iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Minew have announced new beacon firmware for their newer Nordic nRF52832 based beacons. nRF52 consumes less power than nRF51 based designs. The new firmware and apps support iBeacon and Eddystone (URL, UID, TLM) broadcasting simultaneously.
Beacons supporting the new firmware include the E2 Max Beacon, i7 Rock Beacon, C7 Card Beacon and C6 Wearable Beacon that we hope to have in stock in the near future.
View our current Minew beacons.
There’s a new article today at Global Rail News on how MTR, who run the Hong Kong metro, is trialling Bluetooth beacon navigation at Admiralty Station.
“As well as helping customers navigate the station itself, one of the new features, “Fast Exit”, will tell passengers which train car and door number to board when they set off on their journey in order to be closest to the exit at their destination station.”
The pilot is part of MTR’s Rail Gen 2.0 programme.
We are seeing more and more organisations using our beacons with apps that have been created using (online) app generation services. If you are one of these organisations then you ought to be made aware of a recent change to Apple’s review guidelines:
Section 4.2.6 states:
Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected
There’s discussion on this on the Apple forums and on reddit.
Whatever your or others’ view of this, Apple have already started cleaning the hundreds of thousands of titles from App Store. Beware that if you use an app generator, your app might get rejected and even if it’s accepted it might some day be taken down.
Beacons can be used to detect when something is falling. The classic usecase is healthcare where patients can be monitored and an alert generated when they have fallen. However, fall detection can be used in other areas such as mountaineering and construction where human life is in jeopardy due to the high risk of a fall. It’s not just people that can be monitored. Fall detection can be used for valuable/fragile items in places such as warehouses, factories or even in transit.
Detecting falling uses an accelerometer in the beacon. Some sensor beacons generate x y z data that can be used to programatically detect the fall. The problem with this is you need relatively complex local processing such as a smartphone or single board computer to analyse the x y z data. A solution is the iBS01G that not only detects that the beacon is falling but also indicates when the beacon is moving, has gone from still to moving or moving back to still.
The advertising data event status shows the movement states:
The states can be logged or shown directly in an app or sent to a server via a WiFi gateway.
There’s a new article at Nordic Semiconductor blog, By Alf Helge Omre, on Bluetooth Mesh in lighting: What comes next?
Alf explains how lighting is the perfect conduit because it’s everywhere and is also mains powered. The mesh can be used to control the lights as well as provide for IoT sensing.
The main example in the Nordic Mesh SDK is a light control demo which reinforces how important Nordic think lighting will be for mesh. The ‘mains powered’ mention is also important. The introduction to the Bluetooth Mesh SDK says:
“The Bluetooth Mesh requires a higher power consumption than traditional Bluetooth low energy applications, and unlike Bluetooth low energy Advertiser devices, active mesh devices cannot be run off coin-cell batteries for extended periods of time.”
Also, despite all the hype over Bluetooth mesh, TI (the other main SoC provider) don’t have an SDK yet and the Nordic SDK is still alpha:
“This is an experimental release for exploration of the BLE Mesh stack on the nRF5 device family. It is not intended for commercial use”
We have been playing with the Nordic mesh examples and while they work on Nordic’s developer kit hardware we have had ‘alpha’ difficulties getting the mesh working on real beacons. One observation is that the Bluetooth mesh needs more capable SoCs than are found in the majority of our beacons. As previously mentioned, battery life is a concern so USB beacons tend to be the best candidates. Another customer insight is that while it might seem convenient to put sensors into lights, most industrial uses require sensors to be much closer to what’s being sensed. In practice, they will probably not be part of the active mesh and instead sensor beacons will use the friendship feature. We will be providing Bluetooth mesh beacons once the SDK is release quality.
We have also been playing with FruityMesh that’s better suited to battery use and also works on lower spec SoCs. We already have it working on some of our beacons. We have been told by M-Way Solutions that FruityMesh is currently going through a large software update. Once this is completed, we hope to start providing FruityMesh beacons.
Read more about Bluetooth mesh on our web site.
There’s a new updated version of the Universal Bluetooth Beacon Library that works on Windows 10 (UWP) and Android (Xamarin). The core library also works on iOS, Mac and Linux. It allows you to write applications to parse iBeacon and Eddystone advertising.
Mr Beacon has an interesting new interview with Sam Jha, Chief Business Officer of Alpha Ori. Alpha Ori work with the shipping industry that’s still lacking the productivity gains many other industries have experienced through the use of IT. While the interview talks about shipping, it’s equally applicable to all industries.
In the shipping industry, IoT can be used to measure ships’ systems. This can produce thousands of data points per second that can be analysed using ‘big data’ techniques. The key is to identify insights that have value in that they can impact the areas where there are large costs. An example is maintaining up time and using sensing to estimate the life remaining on machinery, detect when things are starting to fail and replace preventative maintenance with predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Better maintained ships can also have the side affect of reducing other costs. Smart ships have lower insurance risk profiles and can hence save insurance costs.
The key message is one of identifying areas where there are large costs and using IT to optimise those areas. In shipping or any industry this usually involves sensing on machinery and systems to maintain optimum up time. It also involves detecting when to perform in-time maintenance to get the maximum life from expensive machinery. Beacons, particularly sensor beacons, provide the sensing part and are especially suitable for areas that don’t have power, lack cabling or are difficult to monitor manually due to accessibility.
Successive Android versions have become increasingly strict on what goes on in background in order to save battery power. The usual way of scanning for beacons on Android is to have an Android Service that uses the Bluetooth API to scan for beacons every n seconds. From Android Oreo (8.0), this is no longer reliable as the OS has background limitations that kill the Service soon after the app UI has gone from the foreground.
Apps now have to use the BluetoothManager BluetoothLEScanner call that sets up a
“The scan results will be delivered via the PendingIntent. Use this method of scanning if your process is not always running and it should be started when scan results are available.” Apps that target multiple Android versions need to support both the old and new mechanisms which complicates development (and support). We offer development services should you need any further advice.
We previously wrote about the requirements for using beacons in vending machines. There’s a new thought provoking article on Kiosk Marketplace on Are kiosks ready for today’s exciting digital technologies?
The article talks about using beacons to promote consumer interaction, track customer shopping patterns and offer rewards but stops short of providing some scenarios and explaining some of the technical possibilities.
Imagine approaching a kiosk and it automatically knowing who you are and providing one touch (or zero touch) vending of your favourite drink or snack. You are billed automatically and you accrue loyalty points. For the merchandiser, think about extra things you could do (or know) if you could target your top customers and offer them frictionless service. These things are possible using beacons.
Depending on what you need to do, the beacon can be in the kiosk or (or and) with the user. If it’s with the user it can be a physical beacon or an app advertising as a beacon. Some scenarios need more functionality or security than is provided with just Bluetooth advertising. In these cases, it’s possible to connect to the beacon via Bluetooth GATT to store or view data.
If you need more help then view our articles or consider a feasibility study.
There’s an interesting new video by Mr Beacon on the state of IoT. It’s an interview with ex-Intel Aidoo Osei with insights on the business side of IoT.
Aidoo talks of IoT being a technology searching for a meaningful problem people are willing to pay to solve. The important part is ‘pay’, as many initiatives such as smart cities require a thorough understanding of how these things might be financed. Also, for many IoT technology providers, there’s a tension between providing open, inter-operable systems and wanting to own the stack.
Aidoo provides an upbeat view of beacons. He thinks beacons are simple at the moment because phones/apps are more capable. As beacons become more used as components of IoT systems, there’s an opportunity for them to be more complex.
While Aidoo didn’t mention this, one example of beacons becoming more complex is the use of mesh networking.