Category: IoT

How is IoT Going?

Vodafone have an informative new report, the Internet of Things (IoT) Barometer. It’s a survey of 1,430 companies worldwide into their use of IoT.

IoT adoption is increasing now that companies are buying more cost-effective, off the-shelf solutions rather than building their own from scratch:

74% of adopters believe that within five years, companies that haven’t adopted IoT will have fallen behind their competition.

Adoption is across all sectors:

“95% of adopters are already seeing benefits. Over half
(52%) say that the returns have been significant and
79% say IoT is enabling positive outcomes that would be
impossible without it.”

The main gains have been:

  • reduced operating costs (53%)
  • improved collection of data (48%)
  • increased revenue from existing streams (42%)

There’s also an accompanying video:

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT Sensors

Bluetooth LE provides a compelling way of implementing IoT sensing because:

  • The sensors are usually already cased and certified rather than experimentor, bare printed circuit boards.
  • Being wireless, they can be placed in remote areas that have no power.
  • Being Bluetooth LE, they can last on battery power for years.
  • Again, being Bluetooth LE, they are suitable for use in noisy electrical areas.
  • They are commodity rather than proprietary items and hence very low cost compared to legacy industrial sensors.
  • No soldering or wiring up is required.
  • They are easy to interface, for example, to Bluetooth gateways and smartphones.
  • They can participate in Bluetooth Mesh to communicate over large areas.
  • They detect a variety of quantities such as movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate, fall detection, smoke, gas and water leak.
  • They are proven. For example, some of our temperature sensors are used to monitor airline cargo.
  • Software exists, such as BeaconServer™ such that you don’t need to write any software.
INGICS Movement Sensor

Need help? Consider a Feasibility Study.

Minew IoT G1 Bluetooth Gateway Testing

If you want to quickly demonstrate or test IoT, the G1 gateway comes pre-setup to send data to beaconyun.com, Minew’s platform for testing.

The following video gives and overview of the platform and how it’s used:

The video mentions entering a beacon’s MAC address. Our article on Testing if a Beacon is Working explains how to find a MAC address.

More information:

Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Using Beacons, iBeacons for Asset Tracking

Tracking things and/or people makes organisations more efficient through enhanced productivity. Most organisations want to improve a specific problem in one of the following areas:

  • Stock Control – Knowing how much you have, where, without any human checking
  • Finding Items – Picking items without time-consuming manual searching
  • Safety & Security – Knowing when assets move, go missing, are dropped or crashed into
  • Process Efficiency – Preventing human error of manual audits, knowing an expensive asset is being fully utilised, providing real time workplace instructions

Having solved a problem, it’s often the case that the act of digitisation allows other problems to be identified and also solved.

There are many ways to track assets using beacons. Beacons can be put on assets and detected by smartphones, Bluetooth gateways, Bluetooth mesh, or other Bluetooth LE devices such as single board computers. Alternatively, beacons can be fixed and the detecting device(s) can move. Software can be in the detecting devices and/or at a server receiving data from the detecting devices. It’s also possible to use a real time locating system (RTLS) to map the positions of assets.

The optimum solution depends on your situation and requirements. Here are some aspects to think about that will determine the optimum solution:

  • What’s the size of area(s) and sub-areas (rooms, zones) you need to cover and is this outside?
  • What’s the physical makeup of the areas (walls, racking) and their composition?
  • What’s the electrical infrastructure (power, WiFi and Ethernet availability) and can this be upgraded?
  • What assets need to be tracked?
  • What attributes of assets need to be tracked (just location or sensor data as well?)
  • How many need to be tracked?
  • How many are in the same place, at the same time?
  • How often do the assets move?
  • How accurate do you need the locating?
  • How up to date do you need the tracking?
  • Who needs to do the tracking, from where?
  • How many people need to do the tracking simultaneously?
  • What kinds of information/report do you require and what’s the desired method of receiving?
  • What existing IT systems have to be integrated?

Contact us if you need help with a complete solution.

Read about Real Time Locating

Read about BeaconRTLS

Read about Asset Tracking for Manufacturers

iGS02E without PoE

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.

New Rugged Industrial Sensor Beacons in Stock

We have some early samples of the new INGICS iBS03 range of beacons in stock. They are functionally similar to the iBS01 range except are waterproof to IP67 and have a more robust case with 2m drop protection.

We stock three variants:
iBS03T – Temperature sensor
iBS03G – Motion (starting/moving/stopped) and fall detection
iBS03RG – Accelerometer for raw xyz

New Waterproof S1 Sensor Beacon in Stock

We have the new Minew S1 in stock. It’s a sensor beacon with accelerometer, temperature and humidity as well as iBeacon/Eddystone. Unusually for a temperature/humidity beacon it is waterproof to IP65 making it suitable for use outdoors. Sensor beacons like this usually have the sensor on the PCB and a hole in the case to pass through ambient temperature and humidity. Instead, the sensor is outside the beacon:

This beacon takes 2 AAA batteries and uses a newer, more efficient Nordic nRF52 System on a Chip (SoC) for a long 3 year battery life.

Partnerships & Ecosystems for Industrial IoT

There’s a useful new post on the Nordic blog on Partnerships & Ecosystems for Industrial IoT. Nordic is the manufacturer of the System-on-a Chip (SoC) in most beacons and Lorenzo is one of their Business Development Managers.

The blog post makes the case for companies not to try to go it alone. The newness and complexity of technologies is such that it’s unlikely you have the skills in-house. What’s more, you

“won’t know what you don’t know”

We have found that it’s often the case with organisations taking up our consultancy, that they ask particular questions when their real problems are somewhere else. They are oblivious to the unknown unknowns.

Another common situation we come across is companies setting off in the wrong direction, doing lots of work and realising it doesn’t work. They contact us for quick fix but sometimes one doesn’t exist. Once you get in deep, it can be hard to pull out and even when things partially work you can end up with long term problems due to poor initial decisions.

The Nordic blog post advocates finding partners. One thing we have found is not to partner with anyone and everyone, at any cost. Only partner when there’s a clear synergy. Be clear whether you really will be a partner or customer. Although there can be some overlap, some unscrupulous companies use partnership as a guise for selling.

Location-based Ambient Intelligence

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:

  • Integration without soldering or, in most cases, without custom electronics
  • Communication with iOS and Android apps and computers via existing Bluetooth APIs
  • Remote, low power, data acquisition where there’s no mains power and no connectivity at the place of measurement
  • Significantly lower cost compared to traditional industrial sensing