Our partner and supplier, KKM, has a new K9AT Wireless Tilt Sensor The K9AT Tilt Sensor is designed to convert accelerometer measurements into precise tilt angle detections. What makes it stand out is its ability to trigger advertisements once it detects an inclination beyond a pre-set value.
The sensor has an IP67 rating, ensuring it is both water-resistant and dustproof. One of the most impressive aspects of the K9AT Tilt Sensor is its longevity. Powered by an industrial-grade ER14505 battery, it offers an extended battery life of up to 8 years.
The applications of the K9AT are vast and varied. From construction and agriculture to automotive and shipping, this sensor can play a critical role in improving operational efficiency and safety. Its ability to provide real-time alerts on angle changes makes it an invaluable tool for monitoring equipment, cargo, and even structural integrity.
For more information or to discuss how it can benefit your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Bluetooth beacons represent a significant and evolving technology due to their integration into the Internet of Things (IoT). These small, wireless transmitters have become increasingly integral to various industries, leveraging the power of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to communicate with and locate nearby smart devices.
Bluetooth beacons emerged in the early 2010s, with Apple’s iBeacon being one of the pioneering technologies in 2013. These initial beacons were primarily used for proximity-based advertising and retail applications. They operated by broadcasting a unique identifier to nearby devices, typically smartphones, which could then trigger specific actions or notifications when within range.
As the technology matured, so did the capabilities of Bluetooth beacons. Beacons gained sensors that detect movement (accelerometer), movement (started/stopped moving), button press, temperature, humidity, air pressure, light level, open/closed (magnetic hall effect), proximity (PIR), proximity (cm range), fall detection and smoke. This evolution expanded the potential use cases for beacons, moving beyond simple proximity notifications to more complex location-based services and data collection.
In the retail sector, beacons continue to enhance customer experiences. They facilitate personalised promotions, guide in-store navigation and provide valuable insights into shopper behaviour. By analysing the data collected from beacon interactions, retailers can optimise store layouts and tailor marketing strategies.
Bluetooth beacons have made inroads into healthcare. In hospitals, they assist in tracking equipment, monitoring medicine temperature, monitoring patients and managing staff workflow. This technology has been particularly useful in enhancing patient care and optimising resource allocation.
In urban environments, beacons contribute to the development of smart cities. They support wayfinding solutions, sense environmental quantities, help manage public transportation systems and aid in monitoring urban infrastructure. By integrating with other IoT devices, they play a crucial role in creating interconnected and efficient urban spaces.
In warehouses, Bluetooth beacons play a pivotal role in streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency. By strategically placing these beacons throughout the facility, warehouse managers can achieve real-time location tracking of both inventory and equipment. This setup enables monitoring of stock levels, swift location of items for order fulfilment and effective management of warehouse space. Additionally, beacons can be used to track the movements of workers, helping to optimise workflows and reduce the time spent searching for items. This level of tracking not only improves operational efficiency but also contributes to enhanced safety by monitoring the flow of foot and vehicle traffic, thus reducing the likelihood of accidents.
In industrial settings and factories, Bluetooth beacons have become instrumental in advancing the concept of the smart factory. They are employed for a variety of purposes, including asset tracking, workflow optimisation and safety enhancements. By attaching beacons to machinery, tools and raw materials, factories can achieve real-time visibility into the location and usage of these assets. This tracking capability is crucial for efficient inventory management and quick response to maintenance needs, reducing downtime. They also enhance worker safety by establishing geofences that alert when personnel enter hazardous areas or when equipment operates in close proximity to workers. Sensor beacons represent a leap forward in monitoring and managing complex operations. These beacons, equipped with various sensors, collect critical data such as temperature, humidity, vibration and light levels. In machinery-heavy sectors, vibration-sensing beacons help predict maintenance needs, detecting early signs of equipment wear or malfunction. This proactive approach to maintenance not only prevents costly downtime but also extends the lifespan of machinery. Furthermore, integrating these sensor beacons with an IoT platform allows for the aggregation and analysis of data, leading to insights that drive operational efficiency and continuous improvement in factory settings.
In summary, As the IoT ecosystem expands, Bluetooth beacons are becoming more intertwined with other technologies. Their ability to bridge the physical and digital worlds makes them essential in creating comprehensive IoT networks. Together with Bluetooth gateways, they facilitate seamless interactions between various smart devices, enhancing data collection and automation.
In sectors such as aerospace, automotive, logistics, transit management and process-driven manufacturing, the quest for efficiency and precision is unending. The integration of Bluetooth beacons into monitoring process control provides a significant leap in addressing these challenges. Traditionally, manual processes suffer from a range of issues. Bluetooth beacons offer a compelling solution to these age-old problems.
Firstly, there’s the matter of process visibility and optimisation. In complex environments like aerospace or automotive manufacturing, keeping track of components and processes is critical. Bluetooth beacons enable real-time tracking and provide data-driven insights, allowing for better decision-making and process optimisation. This technology ensures that every aspect of the manufacturing process is visible and under control, leading to enhanced efficiency and productivity.
A common issue in logistics and transit management is the misplacement of items; things can’t be located or are found in the wrong place. Bluetooth beacons counteract this by offering precise location tracking. This ensures that items are always where they need to be, thereby reducing the time and resources spent on locating misplaced items. In transit management, this translates to smoother operations and reduced delays.
Interaction, or the lack thereof, between components or processes, is another challenge that Bluetooth beacons can handle. In scenarios where two or more things are (or are not) interacting as they should, beacons provide real-time interaction data. This information is crucial in environments where the interplay between different components or processes is key to successful operations.
When it comes to counting, the issue often lies in having too many or too few items in a certain place. Bluetooth beacons facilitate accurate inventory management, ensuring that the right quantity of materials or products is always available where needed. This precision is particularly vital in just-in-time manufacturing processes, where inventory accuracy is paramount.
Time management is another critical factor in process control. A task taking too long or not long enough can significantly impact overall productivity. Beacons can track the time spent on specific tasks, providing insights into potential bottlenecks or inefficiencies. This data is invaluable for optimising workflow and ensuring that time is utilized effectively.
Lastly, sequence plays a pivotal role in manufacturing and logistics. When things happen in the wrong order, it can lead to a cascade of issues. Bluetooth beacons, with their ability to track and record sequences of events, ensure that processes follow the correct order, thereby avoiding costly mistakes and delays.
Beacons are often mentioned as being IoT devices. IoT devices tend to measure and monitor performance and store data in some Big Data way. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and Technical University of Denmark have a paper on Combining Smartphone and iBeacon Technologies in a Transit Quality Survey.
Their proof of concept shows how, what looks like a transport end-user survey, can be additionally used to track service data and monitor performance on transit trips.
The paper has a few insights into the use of beacons. They found that the RSSI and proximity accuracy were affected by the number of people in the surrounding environment such that it was best to place the beacons at high positions at bus stops. They also found they needed to explictly ask users to manually enable Bluetooth on their phones.
They also consider problems that will be experienced if the proof of concept were to be scaled, in particular the dependency on having a wide set of beacon-equipped stops.
If the ultimate vision is to develop a platform for a city’s entire bus network, it may be impractical to install and maintain iBeacons at every bus stop.
There’s also mention of the need for more effective incentives to sustain participation, such as offering reward points or fare discounts.
Micro-Energy Harvesting (MEH) is a technology that captures and converts small amounts of environmental energy such as like light, heat, or motion into electrical energy, which can power small electronic devices. The study suggests that MEH could be a sustainable solution for powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including Bluetooth sensors, due to their low power requirements.
The benefits of MEH include reducing the need for costly and environmentally harmful battery replacements and enabling the deployment of IoT devices in remote or hard-to-reach areas. The study also points out challenges, such as the small and variable amount of energy that can be harvested, which may not provide a reliable power supply for devices that need a steady source of energy. However, even with small temperature gradients between the environment and the cold side of the thermoelectric generator, it wass possible to make several communications per hour.
There are three main ways beacons can be integrated into existing systems:
1. Using Smartphone Apps
Beacons are usually stationary. Apps on users’ smartphone use the standard Bluetooth iOS and Android APIs to detect beacons and send information to your cloud or servers, typically via HTTP(S).
2. Using Ethernet/WiFi Gateways
Beacons are using moving. Gateways in fixed positions detect beacons and send information to your cloud or servers, typically via HTTP(S) or MQTT.
3. Using an Intermediate Platform Such as a Real Time Location System (RTLS)
This is a variant on #2 in that gateways send information to a system such as BeaconRTLS™ or PrecisionRTLS™. These systems have HTTP(S) APIs that can be used by your cloud or servers.
When a Bluetooth WiFi Gateway sends data to a server via HTTP, the gateway has to connect to the server to start a connection and then use that connection to send the data. The connection part starts a new TCP connection with handshaking. Starting a new connection every time data needs to be sent to the server uses network data and creates work for the server.
iGS01S
Some gateways such as the IGS01s have a ‘keep-alive’ setting that allows the connection to be re-used across HTTP requests. This reduces the amount of data used on metered networks such as cellular, reduces possibly metered data throughput at the server and also reduces server loading thus improving performance.
Having said all this, you should consider MQTT if you are really concerned about efficiency and performance.
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.
INGICSLair
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.
Since we have been selling the AKMW-iB003N-SHT and AKMW-iB004N PLUS SHT we have been getting a few questions regarding accessing the temperature and humidity data.
You should first read the manufacturer’s SHT20 User Guide (username and password supplied with your beacon).
If you are connecting via GATT to read the sensor data then you will need to set the beacon to be always connectable. The way to do this is (for some strange reason) only shown in the iB001M user guide:
So if you wish to transmit iBeacon and remain connectable, set the value to 0x82. Note that if you subsequently set the beacon ‘on’ or ‘off’ in the ‘simple’ configuration screen, accessed via the spanner icon (Android) or Configure option (on iOS), then this will overwrite your set value.
However, you might instead consider reading the sensor data from the advertising data which a) is much easier to program and b) uses much less beacon battery power and c) allows multiple apps to see the data at the same time.
Bluetooth WiFi gateways offer MQTT and/or HTTP for sending data to servers/cloud services. We are often asked which should be used. HTTP is what’s used by your web browser to fetch and send data to web servers. In very high level terms, MQTT accomplishes a similar thing but is better optimised for mobile devices and the Internet of Things.
HTTP is very ‘chatty’ which means it’s more complex, code wise, to implement at the sending end and wastes a lot of data and processing power getting information from sender to receiver. You can think of HTTP as wrapping the data within lots other data that gets sent backwards and forwards. MQ Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT) came out of IBM, is now an ISO standard and uses lightweight publish/subscribe messaging. It requires a smaller code footprint at the sender and uses less network bandwidth. This matters most when you are trying to get the maximum transactions per second or are being billed for data use.
Bluetooth WiFi gateways are powered via USB and have reasonably powerful microcontrollers so MQTT’s efficient processing doesn’t matter that much. The more efficient processing is more applicable to apps running on mobile devices. For example, Facebook uses MQTT which saves battery life.
However, being lightweight, MQTT offers faster response times and lower data use than HTTP that, while not necessarily being of much of an advantantage for the BLE WiFi gateway, benefits the communications medium and server side. The communications medium, that can sometimes be cellular or be data constrained, uses (and possibly bills) less data. More crucially, the server can process more requests in less time. MQTT tends to be better when connectivity is intermittent, bandwidth is at a premium and throughput is critical.
In summary, MQTT has lower latency and is more efficient. Whether these are required advantages depends on your actual project. If you need more help, consider our development services.
