iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Our Beaconzone Ltd founder, Simon Judge has a new article on LinkedIn on IoT Digital Twins, Sensing and Bluetooth Sensors.
Learn about Digital Twins and how Bluetooth sensor beacons can be used to provide data to drive models of systems, mirroring real-time status to improve operational efficiency.
Mr Beacon has a new video interview with Dieter Fenkart-Fröschlt, COO of the San Diego Museum of Art. The video explains why the San Diego Museum of Art adopted apps and beacons and explains some of the challenges they have faced.
The museum has about 360,000 visitors per year, 18,000 works of art with 700 to 800 works of art on display at any one time. Apps and beacons became part of their strategic planning to change how people interact with the museum and bring enquiry based learning, more typical of natural history and science museums, to an art museum.
Apps and beacons are the solution to delivering more content than can be shown on walls. They provide the stories behind the art. While the initial aim was to engage more younger audiences, it turned out the apps are used by all ages. It’s interesting that people have “fallen in love” with the museum experience, not just the art itself.
One of the largest lessons learned was that “build it they will come” doesn’t apply. Rollout needed to be holistic. Frontline staff had to be trained and visitors reminded that the app is free and part of their admission fee. There’s also marketing at conferences, events, on business cards and obviously next to the artwork itself.
One of the incidental yet profound gains had been insights through data. The museum now knows how long people spend at the museum and at each exhibit. They know the most liked and most viewed art that helps work out what kinds of art are popular (or not!). This feeds into making the museum more popular through people returning, again something that can now be measured.
The museum has about 120 beacons and the functionality of the app changes depending on whether the user is in the museum or not. Visitors can access related videos, introductions to artists and other objects in the museum related to given art. The app also displays images, for example showing how the art has changed, through conservation, over time. There are also app scavenger hunts for kids.
The main initial challenges were physical : How to fix the beacons to to walls and blend them into the colour of the wall.
View the Video to discover more
BeaconZone’s very first beacon apps were related to tagging artwork at the Folkstone Triennial, Frieze London, Saatchi Gallery and the Fine Art Society . The Mr beacon video doesn’t mention any of the technical challenges of using beacons in visitor spaces. For example, there can be problems relying on connectivity indoors that requires solutions such as intelligent caching. Care also has to be taken to prevent excessive triggering, something that becomes more complex when adjacent beacons transmission overlap. If you need more help, consider a Feasibility Study.
If you are sending data from Bluetooth WiFi Gateways via MQTT then you might want to look at using Apache NiFi on the server to get data into your systems. Apache NiFi is:
“An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data”
It has over 135 different processors to easily consume data and send it on to other systems.
NiFi has processors to Get and Put data to an MQTT broker. An example of re-publishing can be found at hortonworks.com.
NiFi provides a web-based user interface to manage dataflows in real time. The project was originally open-sourced by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
A beacon has many settings such as the mode (iBeacon, Eddystone), transmission (ids or URL), power and advertising period. These settings are set via the manufacture app. However, what happens if the beacon is switched off via a button on the side of the button? What happens if the battery is removed? What happens to the settings?
First of all, if you turn off a beacon via a side switch beacons don’t power down but instead go into a very low power sleep mode.
All beacons have a portion of non-volatile flash memory that can be used to save values even when the power is removed by taking out the battery or removing from a USB slot. This means for almost all beacons, removing the power doesn’t cause the beacon to lose its settings. We say ‘almost all’ because we have found one exception to be Sky beacons that while they retain settings when the side switch is pressed on/off, they don’t retain settings if the battery is removed. This is because the firmware (code) in the beacon isn’t saving settings to non-volatile memory.
One thing to be aware of is that the non-volatile memory can only be updated so many times before it stops working. The number of times is very large and isn’t of consequence unless you have your own app that is frequently programatically changing settings. However, for some specialist beacons, for example mesh beacons, internally saved data can and will change more often thus introducing the possibly that beacons can become ‘worn out’ if the software isn’t designed to reduce the frequency of changed saved data.
Some of the beacons we sell are waterproof. When most people think about waterproofing electronics they think about protection from splashes or submersion. However, there are some scenarios where waterproofing might not seem to be needed but is actually is required.
One such example is in vehicles. While the inside of a vehicle might seem dry, it can have long periods of high humidity. This can cause the metal parts of the beacon and/or the battery to rust leading to failure of the beacon. Waterproofing also keeps humidity out. So, also think about potential humidity when specifying your beacon.
There’s an article on DigitalNewsDaily about the Indianapolis Colts where a federal judge has ruled that the basketball team must face a lawsuit alleging that the team’s mobile app eavesdropped on fans.
“The app activates phones’ microphones in order to listen to Lisnr’s beacons”
To be clear, these aren’t Bluetooth beacons. Instead, Lisnr uses beacons emitting audio to trigger events in an app:
“LISNR is an ultrasonic audio technology — a communication protocol that uses inaudible sound, called Smart Tones™, to transmit information.”
Unlike with Bluetooth beacons, this necessarily uses the smartphones’ microphone to detect the audio beacons. Had the Colts used Bluetooth Beacons, there would have been no issue over whether microphone listening was being used for nefarious purposes.
If you take a look at the recently announced Bluetooth SIG mesh, it’s described by three specifications with around 1000 pages! It took three years to create. So what’s the rationale that caused it to be so complex?
For some answers, take a look at Szymon Slupik’s personal blog. Szymon is the Chair Mesh Working Group at Bluetooth SIG and his posts give a fascinating insight into the thinking behind the Bluetooth SIG mesh.
Start with the post on Bluetooth Mesh – The Launch and then read about The Packet, Depth, Flexibility and Scalability.
You can also follow Szymon on Twitter.
Read more about Bluetooth mesh on our web site.
There’s an interesting Video on YouTube by Marcus Rangell who has used a RuvviTag to get a notification when a mousetrap has been triggered:
Using a RuuviTag is probably over-engineering the solution. Any beacon that provides motion triggered broadcast would be suitable. Also, it’s simpler to use gateways to scan the beacons.
While this scenario might seem frivolous, the problem is real and some US companies already implement trap activation detection. There are many warehouses, food factories and food storage facilities that have rodent problems. The usual mouse and rat traps are ok but they need checking regularly as decaying rodents also aren’t desirable. Triggered traps also need re-arming as they are the ones most likely to catch more rodents. Doing the checking manually across many sites can be a full time job for many people. Trigger detection can be automated such that only triggered traps have to be visited and the resultant data can be used to automate the creation of simple reports of the most troublesome sites/areas.
Many existing or new mobile apps can be made more immersive and hence improve retention through the use of beacons. Sometimes, app authors add beacon detection and suddenly realise their app is also useful to totally different usecases.
One such app is Tourist Chat which started out as a travel app to allow tourists to connect. The author recently started using the same app and server side to support exhibition events. Many beacon apps are essentially the same. They detect beacons and match this up to information in a server-side CMS. The ‘use’ or scenario can be many things: for example travel, exhibitions, hotels, retail, galleries and museums.
If you are creating a beacon-driven app, take a moment to think how it might also be re-purposed for other types of user. You might find a new market and revenue stream with relatively little effort.
There’s a new command line Python-based utility for Linux called Bleah that describes itself as a “BLE scanner for smart devices hacking”. Don’t let the ‘hacking’ part put you off – all it does is scan for devices and enumerate/use Bluetooth GATT Service much like the many apps for iOS and Android like Nordic nRF Connect. Nevertheless, it’s useful should you need to do these things from Linux rather than mobile apps.
If you use this utility (or mobile apps) you need to be aware that most Beacons are not connectable by default and most have password protected Bluetooth Services preventing you writing to them without having written the password to a specific Service. You will need to read the documentation for the beacon to determine how to make it connectable and to ascertain the default password.