Author: Support

Using Beacons For a Library Tour

There’s an interesting article at code4lib on Creation of a Library Tour Application for Mobile Equipment using iBeacon Technology by Virginia Tech. It describes a project where a QR code driven library tour was updated to use beacons.

Some insights include how attractive beacons can become ‘lost’, the problem of replacing batteries, limited battery life due to the iOS requirement for beacons to advertise every 100ms and challenges physically fixing beacons.

As mentioned in our article on Choosing an Advertising Interval, it’s possible to set the advertising interval to between 300ms and 600ms while maintaining a reasonable detection time. Also, had the library chosen Android tablets they could have used a much longer advertising interval. 100ms is an artificial thing set by Apple for very quick detection on iOS devices. On Android, the scanning is more controllable,you can scan for longer and hence have beacons that advertise less often and have much longer battery life.

Bluetooth 5 and Beacons

We have been receiving enquiries about Bluetooth 5 and how it affects beacons. Some people have even asked “where are the Bluetooth 5 beacons?”

In terms of beacons, Bluetooth 5 provides:

  • x4 the range
  • x2 the speed
  • increase broadcast advertising message size x 800%

The greater range will benefit most new beacon implementations but there are already some Bluetooth 4 ultra long range beacons with output power amplifiers that boost the Bluetooth 4 range from the typical 50m to 300m.

The speed increase probably won’t be noticed as it’s the discovery/connection time rather than the ‘bits per second’ that’s usually the determining factor for the few beacon users who connect to beacons.

Additionally, there’s also deeper access into the physical host controller interface so that the speed and range can be configured to adjust for different scenarios but it remains to be seen if this will be used in beacon implementations.

The most significant change for beacons is the larger advertising data size. This means the beacon can more easily transmit sensor, telemetry or new types of data. It will potentially also allow Eddystone-URL to do away with the need for URL shorteners but, even if this happens, some applications might still use them for other reasons such as easily being able to redirect the URL to elsewhere.

For those of you wanting Bluetooth 5 now, you will need to wait. While there’s already SoC chips, such as the nRF52840, that support Bluetooth 5, other things such as the iBeacon/Eddystone specs need to catch up to (possibly) use the new advertising data size. Also, (new) phones will need to catch up to support Bluetooth 5. After that, Android and iOS will probably need updated OS Bluetooth APIs. Only once the ecosystem is in place will the majority of beacon manufacturers see it’s worth it to release new Bluetooth 5 beacons.

All this isn’t going to happen overnight. When it does, we might end up with a fragmented and more-complicated ecosystem where older Bluetooth 4 phones won’t be able to take advantage of the newer features of the Bluetooth 5 beacons.

Beacons for Smart Technologies in Tourism

There’s a thought provokingresearch paper, by Breda University of Applied Sciences (pdf) no longer available, prepared for last year’s International Tourism Student Conference on Smart Technologies in Tourism.

It’s based around a case study of 232 iBeacons having been used at SAIL Amsterdam forming five private and public beacon networks. The paper discusses what Smart Tourism is, how to measure customer experience and the various phases a tourist goes through (anticipatory, planning, experiential, reflection).

69,000 people, 3% of all SAIL visitors, used the app and of these 47% had their Bluetooth turned on. Nevertheless, this allowed the organisers to track visitors’ behavior and manage visitor flows. It was the end user features of the app/system that were less utilised than they could have been.

The paper discusses visitors’ perceived loss of privacy when installing the app. The solution is seen to be to ensure that users perceive the provision of their data/location as a fair deal to receiving information. Another issue is being careful when sending out push notifications as psychological factors can have big influence on customers’ reaction to them. Another issue discussed is the differing interests of the developers, sponsors and SAIL organisers when creating the app.

Success in using beacons and apps is tied to how much information visitors have on the possibilities and benefits in installing and using (turning Bluetooth on) the app. As the paper says:

“Organisers need to provide extensive information about the technology and the proper usage of it in order to profit from the maximum services that the apps offer.”

Tracker Beacons Now In Stock

We now have some tracker Bluetooth beacons in stock. Tracker beacons are Bluetooth beacons designed specifically for tracking physical items or remote camera button-type applications but they can be used for other purposes. Unlike iBeacon, Eddystone and Sensor beacons, there’s no configuration app, the Bluetooth advertising data is fixed and can’t be re-configured.

Tracker beacons differ from (most) iBeacons in that they, once connected via Bluetooth GATT, allow the beacon to ring, can detect a beacon button press and the beacon can ring when it goes out of range.

Tracker beacons can also be used, without GATT connection, to detect presence by using their MAC address on Android/gateways, or peripheral id on iOS CoreBluetooth, to uniquely identify them.

There are many poor quality tracker beacons on the market that are unreliable. It has taken us a while to find quality tracker beacons that also have known Bluetooth Services/Characteristics for programming purposes.

Beacons and Vending Machines

We are seeing an increasing interest in using beacons in vending machines. This is probably driven by Coca-Cola’s recent partnership with Signal360.

Beacons not only provide the opportunity for easier purchasing, via apps, from vending machines but also facilitate reward programmes and targeted contextual content based on the user’s location.

Vending machine companies contacting us are asking the usual questions regarding range and size. However, a more specific requirement is the ability to be mains powered. One way to achieve this is to use a smartphone-type USB mains adapter (offering a standard USB socket) and a USB beacon. Alternatively, the vending machine hardware might already have, or be able to be fitted with, a USB slot.

Bluetooth Power Consumption in Phones

A growing use of beacons is for continually monitoring using sensor beacons. However, one concern is how continually reading a Bluetooth sensor beacon might affect phone battery life.

There’s a recent research paper by Kleomenis Katevas, Hamed Haddadi and Laurissa Tokarchuk of Queen Mary University of London, UK on Power use : SensingKit: Evaluating the Sensor Power Consumption in iOS devices. It looks into Bluetooth beacon (phone) power use and, as a baseline, compares this to phone battery power use by sensors in the phone. They evaluated beacon broadcasting and scanning modes separately and together.

Very few scenarios use the phone to broadcast so the pink dotted line probably has less relevance. Looking at the scanning test it can be seen that it consumes power of the same order of magnitude as other sensors in the phone itself. Bluetooth LE scanning isn’t especially power hungry. Nevertheless, the 25hrs hours operation time on battery might be a limitation for most sensing scenarios.

An omission in these tests is that they only considered scanning rather than connecting. Some beacons need to be connected to via Bluetooth GATT, to obtain sensor data, that uses more phone battery power because it requires the phone to transmit to the beacon instead of just listening to the advertising scan data.

In practice, sensing projects are often better served by using a WiFi gateway or a phone/tablet permanently plugged in rather than a user’s battery-powered phone. This allows the device receiving sensor data to be mains powered removing concerns regarding device power use.

Beacons in Outdoor Learning Spaces

If you are working in learning, you might want to take a look at a new research paper Designing Outdoor Learning Spaces With iBeacons: Combining Place-Based Learning With the Internet of Learning Things (pdf). It takes a long time to download because it’s part of a compendium of research from the 12th International Conference of the Learning sciences.

The paper discusses place-based science learning in the context of an arboretum. It describes the use of beacons for informal learning, place-based learning, and context-sensitive educational technologies. Content was delivered in the arboretum with question prompts and activities so as to encourage deeper learning of plants

The paper says it has:

“insights into designing for learner-centered mobile computing that moves beyond presenting just-in-time information to creating digital-physical spaces where learners engage each other and natural objects to support their interests in science.”

“Beyond presenting just-in-time information” is an interesting aspect in that it can be just as applicable to other beacon usecases.

Beacon Detection Faulty on iOS 10

We have had several companies contact us very recently regarding problems with beacon detection on iOS 10. Problems include not detecting beacons when the app is not running and, when the app is running, beacons suddenly not being seen when they are in range. Another reported symptom is beacons not being detected for a very long time. These problems are all with apps that previously ‘just worked’ under iOS 9. The problems are erratic in that everything works ok on some people’s phones.

We have done some tests with our apps and have reproduced the background scenario of a beacon not being detected on a phone running iOS 10.0.1 that is detected, at the same time, by the same app on iOS 9. Strangely, once the power/screen is manually activated on the iOS 10 phone, the beacon gets detected. Updating to the latest 10.1.1 doesn’t fix the problem.

There are related posts on the ‘Beacon Ranging Problem in 10‘ and ‘Beacon Ranging in background on iOS10 is not working‘ on the Apple forums suggesting similar problems.

This is just a public service announcement that if beacon detection isn’t working for you at the moment the problem is not necessarily with your implementation or the product/app you are using. We believe the problem has been reported to Apple and you will need to wait for an iOS update with a fix.

UPDATE: See https://openradar.appspot.com/29509635

UPDATE March 2017: Troubleshooting iBeacon Background Triggering

New INGICS Bluetooth Sensor Beacons

We have some new INGICS Sensor beacons in stock.

These are slightly different to our other beacons in that they don’t transmit iBeacon or Eddystone. Instead the Bluetooth advertising is wholly used for sensor and battery information. Hence, they are more suitable for sensing, security and IoT applications rather than retail-marketing type scenarios.

There are 4 models:
iBS01G – movement/fall sensor
iBS01H – magnetic (hall) sensor
iBS01RG – (raw) accelerometer sensor
iBS01T – temperature and humidity sensor

ibs01t_smaller

They derive power from 2xCR2032 or via a micro USB smartphone charger (not supplied). They all also have a detectable button press. While the manufacturer’s app shows the sensor data, you will probably need a custom app or gateway to scan and use the advertising data.