iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
We have two new industrial temperature and humidity and sensors with built-in displays.
The Minew MST01-02 and MST01-03 are similar except that the latter has the probe on a 1m cable and has a slightly higher maximum 80C temperature rather than 70C for the MST01-02.
Multiple temperature and humidity thresholds can be set. When values are exceeded, there is an audio alarm and a visual indication shown on the screen.
We have the new Minew P1 Plus in stock. It’s a sensor beacon designed for rough environments and is IP68 waterproof, IK09 shockproof and has a wider than normal temperature rating due to use of the included industrial ER14250H lithium battery.
This beacon has temperature and accelerometer sensors. It’s turned on and off via a magnetic switch. As with other Minew beacons it advertises up to 6 channels that can be iBeacon, Eddystone UID, Eddystone URL, Eddystone TLM and device info.
We have a new small, thin, wearable beacon the K21 in stock. It advertises iBeacon, Eddystone and sensor advertising including the battery level, temperature and acceleration (x, y, z).
This beacon can also be used to detect motion and the button press.
Some sensor beacons can be used to monitor temperature. The first thing to consider when comparing temperature beacons is whether they have a dedicated hardware temperature sensor. Some beacons have a temperature sensor inside the main chip (System on a Chip – SoC) that’s less accurate and has less precision. The sensor is mainly there to give an indication of the chip temperature, not the ambient (outside the beacon) temperature. Most beacons only transmit for the order of 1ms every 10 to 5 seconds and enter a very low power state the remainder of the time. This means they not only use low power but don’t significantly heat the SoC. This means the SoC roughly tracks the outside temperature.
In our sensor beacon listings, when we say a beacon has a temperature sensing it has a separate hardware sensor, usually the Sensirion SHT20, providing more accuracy and precision than the sensor in a SoC. Some of our beacons, such as the Minew i3 and i7 have an internal SoC temperature sensor that’s readable but we don’t classify that as a sensor beacon.
The next thing to consider is the casing. In order to quickly track ambient temperature, the casing needs to be open somewhere and usually have a hole. Beacons that say they are waterproof and have temperature sensing won’t track ambient temperature well.
We have had customers use temperature sensing beacons in scientific situations and where they need to periodically calibrate sensing equipment. How do you calibrate temperature sensor beacons? The SHT20 is has a long term drift of only <0.04 deg C/year (the humidity reading vaies difts by <0.5%RH/year) so it doesn’t need calibration for most situations. However, if you need better than this, or check calibration, you will need to periodically calibrate in the software of the device (usually an app) that receives the beacon sensor data.