iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Bluetooth gateways scan for beacons and send detected data your server, BeaconServer™ or BeaconRTLS™. However, what if you don’t have a server yet or want to determine if a gateway is actually sending data?
Ubeac allows you to set up a hook to receive gateway data. What’s more, they have some informative setup videos for our INGICS, Minew, AnkhMaway and Aprilbrother gateways.
Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)
View Bluetooth gateways
We have the new INGICS iGS01S Bluetooth WiFi gateway in stock.
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)
Minew has a new video showcasing the G1:
The G1 gateway collects advertising data from iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth LE sensor and other Bluetooth LE devices and sends it to your server by HTTP(S) or MQTT/ using WiFi or Ethernet.
More information:
Available Gateways
Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)
We now have the INGICS iGS02E Bluetooth to Ethernet gateway (without PoE) in stock.
This small device looks for Bluetooth LE devices and sends their advertising on to a server via TCP, HTTP(S) or MQTT including AWS IoT. If you use with sensor beacons, this provides a quick and easy way to provide for IoT sensing.
Compatible with BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™.
We also stock the INGICS PoE splitter.
We have the new Minew G1 gateway in stock. The G1 gateway collects advertising data from iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth LE sensor and other Bluetooth LE devices and sends it to your server by HTTP(S) or MQTT/ using WiFi or Ethernet.
Special features of this gateway are that that it supports both WiFi and Ethernet and has a high throughput of up to 200 Bluetooth LE devices detected per second.
ABI Research predicts that there’s going to be an increase in beacon-enabled app shipments mainly due to retail and ambient intelligence:
So what is ambient intelligence? It’s a catch all term for the joining of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, the connected home, wearables, smartphones, voice/image recognition and artificial intelligence through machine learning.
Sensor beacons enable the gathering of new data. New data not only measures physical things but, more importantly, provides a way of circumventing the problem of silo data in many large organisations. Silo data is data people/departments don’t want to share for fear of losing power or control. Today’s machine learning techniques also require data to be in a specific format and ‘clean’. Creating new data allows it to be more readily formatted and conditioned prior to saving.
This isn’t just about location data. It includes physical quantities such as smaller-scale movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate and fall detection. Our conversations with beacon manufacturers tell us beacons are currently being developed that detect more nuanced quantities such as colour, gas and UV. Some beacons already have general purpose input/output (GPIO) such that custom beacons can can already detect anything for which there’s an electronic sensor.
So why Bluetooth beacons rather than other electronics with the same sensors? Here are the main reasons:
We have the new AprilBrother BLE Gateway V4 in stock. This is the first gateway to support both WiFi and Ethernet.
Another first is that it sends advertising to your server using the efficient MessagePack JSON format.
We have the AB BLE Gateway in stock. This improves on the original AB Wireless Gateway in that it provides double the throughput, detecting 50 beacons/sec.
Gateways are the glue that makes beacons part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and enable real time positioning and sensing.
Read more about:
Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)
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).
McKinsey has a useful chart where they assess the potential impact of the IoT by segment:
It can be seen that ‘Factory’ has the greatest potential. This links with ‘Industry 4.0‘, the current trend for more automation and data exchange in manufacturing with the aim of significantly improving efficiency. But what does this mean in practice and what are challenges? Can these be solved with Bluetooth beacons?
We have learnt that while just about every industry client has different needs, all solutions involve context and location. Context is sensing, while location is where the sensing occurs.
Requirements we have experienced range from being able to pick up documents for particular machinery through to actual sensing such as detecting vibration is within (safety) bounds for ‘aggressive’ equipment. We have also seen the requirement for matching workers with workstations and jobs as well as the tracking of workers, tools, pallets, parts and fabrications. There’s also the need for real-time overviews for short term safety and efficiency management, the same longer term data also being used for process improvement and planning.
So why beacons?
Read about using Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)