iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Minew have announced new beacon firmware for their newer Nordic nRF52832 based beacons. nRF52 consumes less power than nRF51 based designs. The new firmware and apps support iBeacon and Eddystone (URL, UID, TLM) broadcasting simultaneously.
Beacons supporting the new firmware include the E2 Max Beacon, i7 Rock Beacon, C7 Card Beacon and C6 Wearable Beacon that we hope to have in stock in the near future.
View our current Minew beacons.
The same day we posted about the research paper on Bluetooth Mesh networks, the Bluetooth SIG happened to announce the public availability of their Bluetooth Mesh.
There are lots of marketing articles saying what will be possible and at the other end of the scale, mesh networking specifications that explain how it works. However, to implement these things, we need something in between marketing and specs that works with real hardware.
Today, there’s a new article on the Nordic InfoCenter blog that explains, in simpler terms, how the Bluetooth mesh works and introduces the Nordic SDK.
As we mentioned in our previous article, Bluetooth LE mesh networks tend to leave the application layer to the developer. This is so that mesh network can be used in many scenarios in many vertical industries. However, what’s particularly interesting with the Nordic SDK is that they have implemented some of the application level:
For beacons:
“We have therefore created a Beacon API as part of the Mesh SDK to do concurrent Beaconing and mesh networking”
Taking a look at the part of the SDK for beacons, there’s an API to define the device as a beacon with an advertising payload and advertising interval. The payload is up to the developer. While this falls short of defining APIs for the iBeacon and Eddystone beacon types, it provides a baseline for manufacturers and 3rd party solution providers such as ourselves to create new beacon products and solutions.
Nordic, who supply the System On a Chip (SoC) in many beacons, have recently released the nRF52810 SoC.
Nordic already offer the nRF52840 and nRF52832 but while these have been suitable for use in Bluetooth 5 beacons they are over-specified and hence too expensive for use in most beacons. The nRF52810 solves this problem by providing a reduced feature set that makes this SoC typically 25% less expensive. Nordic say:
“The nRF52810 represents the most accessible, single-chip Bluetooth 5 solution available on the market today.”
A post on the Nordic devzone explains the main differences between the nRF52810 and nRF52832. It’s mainly removal NFC and other peripherals that aren’t important for beacons.
The nRF52810 supports Bluetooth 5 high speed and advertising extensions but, interestingly, not long range. It’s expected that the removal of the redundant peripherals should also improve power and hence battery use.