iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
We have the new INGICS iBS06 credit card beacon in stock.
This beacon also supports NFC and contains the NXP MIFARE S50 EV1. The advertising is NOT iBeacon and instead sends out sensor data advertising. Hence it is more suited to RTLS and detection by gateways rather than detection by smartphone Bluetooth iBeacon APIs.
Beacons can’t withstand very high temperatures due to the battery that can only typically operate up to +60°C. If you need to measure higher temperatures, it’s necessary to use a beacon with a temperature probe with just the probe being placed in the higher temperature environment.
This beacon is also suitable for measuring low temperatures, down to -50°C, whereas non-probe beacons are usually limited to -30°C due to the battery.
INGICS, supplier of Bluetooth WiFi gateways and sensor beacons, has a new open source example. The BeaconLair code is implemented using Docker to simplify setup. Internally it uses Golang, Eclipse Mosquitto, InfluxDB and Grafana. The platform receives data from INGICS iGS03 BLE gateways and data from iBS sensor beacons.
The dashboard, using Grafana, provides gateways remote control, viewing of beacons and beacon sensor values.
It can be used to remotely control gateways including device OTA upgrade, changing of the RSSI filters and provides configuration using all supported telnet commands.
We have limited quantities of the new INGICS iGS03W Bluetooth WiFi gateway in stock.
The iGS03W listens for beacons, gets their advertising data and forwards it on to your server or an IoT server via TCP, HTTP(S) or MQTT including AWS IoT, Google Cloud IoT and Azure IoT Hub.
It differs from the iGS01S in that it supports greater throughput, Bluetooth 5 Long Range mode (LE Coded PHY) and also includes a wall holder.
We have a new specialist sensor beacon INGICS iBS03R in stock. It uses a time of flight (TOF) sensor to accurately detect distance to ±25mm over a range 40mm to 3m and 27 degree field of view.
It’s suitable for applications such as waste can, toilet paper, sanitiser, inventory monitoring and industrial automation.
INGICS, the manufacturer of some of the Bluetooth gateways we supply, has a new open source DemoBoard that can be used to demonstrate and test their gateways.
The software supports M2M (TCP) and MQTT connections.
The dashboard shows the number of messages and beacons:
Clicking on the number of messages shows a log of the received messages:
Clicking on a message shows parsed values:
You can also drill down on the beacons:
We now have the INGICS iGS03E Bluetooth to Ethernet gateway in stock. This differs to the iGS02E in that it includes Power over Ethernet (PoE) without having to have an external PoE splitter.
Gateways look 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.
The iGS03E is one of the first gateways to also support Bluetooth 5 in Long Range mode (LE Coded PHY), although very few advertising devices support this yet.
Compatible with BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™.
Last week we wrote about Bluetooth Sensors for the Smart Home and how Karl Wachs has been adding lots of our sensor beacons to the indigo domotics Mac-based smart home software.
Karl has posted how he is using an iBS03TP to measure the temperature of his pool.
Please note BeaconZone only supplies Business to Business
It never been easier to collect Bluetooth sensor information and store it in the cloud. The INGICS gateways come with step-by-step instructions how to set up AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub and Google IoT Core.
Read more about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT).
If you are rolling out many gateways, there comes a time when you start wondering if all of them are working and connected. While it’s possible to write a server side script/code to detect whether or not data has been received from the gateway in the last n seconds/minutes, this doesn’t work when there aren’t any Bluetooth devices in the vicinity of some gateways which won’t be sending payloads.
The INGICS gateways have a way of setting up a heartbeat that’s a dummy payload used to indicate a gateway is working and connected. It’s set up by telnet to the gateway and issuing the following command followed by a reboot:
> SYS HEARTBEAT 1
> REBOOT
The ‘1’ signifies every 1 minute and allows setting up to 255 minutes. A $HBRP data payload is to the server in the form:
$HBRP,FECE97089146,FECE97089146,-127,00000000
The heartbeat functionality is available on firmware IGS01-v2.0.0 and IGS01S-v2.0.0 or later.