Bluetooth beacons can last a long time on battery power, up to 5 years in some cases. However, long battery lifetimes require larger batteries that are more bulky and result in devices that are less suitable to wear.
The smallest beacons, most suitable for wearing, have small CR2032 coin cell batteries that can only typically last of the order of a few months. The solution is to use rechargeable beacons. They all charge via some sort of USB, either plugin, via a clip or magnetic connector.
The iB001W, supporting iBeacon and Eddystone, comes with a small charging cradle that plugs into the beacon.
The H1 Wristband is waterproof and has an acceleration sensor that supports motion triggered broadcast to save battery life. It charges via a clip.
The F1 is waterproof and has an acceleration sensor for motion triggered broadcast and also has a SOS button. It charges via a magnetic connection cable.
The B10 has an acceleration sensor but additionally makes this information available via advertising. It also has an SOS button and charges via a magnetic connector.
The waterproof W2-P5202D3 is a fitness tracker style device that advertises iBeacon, Eddystone and acceleration.
When choosing a beacon with an accelerometer, care needs to be taken that it supports the anticipated use. In some cases the accelerometer can control the functionality within the beacon while in other’s it provides raw data that can be used by other Bluetooth devices such as smartphones, gateways and single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi.
The most common use of an accelerometer is to provide for motion triggered broadcast. This is when the beacon only advertises when the beacon is moving so as to improve battery life and lessen the redundant processing needed by observing devices. Beacons supporting motion triggering include the M52-SA Plus, F1, K15, and the H1 Wristband.
A few beacons such as the iBS01G and iBS03G interpret the movement as starting, stopping and falling with a consequent change in Bluetooth advertising.
Some people come to us, having set up their beacons, saying “It doesn’t work”. Most scenarios involve a beacon, an app and a phone. Solving most problems involves breaking the problem down by swapping out each of the beacon, app and phone until it works.
If you have more than one beacon, you can swap out the beacon. Having said this, it’s rare for beacons to fail and if the problem is with the beacon, it’s more likely to be the beacon settings that are incorrect.
While you can’t swap out the manufacturer configuration app, you can use another app such as Nordic’s nRF Connect (on iOS and Android) to scan for a beacon, see if it’s advertising and if so, what type of advertising it is sending.
It’s common for individual phones to have have problems. First, make sure you have Location and Bluetooth on. Anyone working with beacons will usually need to have both Android and iOS devices to diagnose problems. Run the app (and nRF Connect) on multiple phones of different platform type (iOS/Android) to help narrow down problems.
If you still can’t get it working, send us a support ticket. Please don’t just say “It doesn’t work” and instead describe what you have done and at what stage it doesn’t work with any error messages.
The solution works on the premise that people who get lost generally go to places where there are other people. A Bluetooth beacon-based device is detected by an app installed by 23,400 ‘dementia angels’. They receive an alert when someone is lost and are asked to turn on Bluetooth and location. When the lost person is detected the location is anonymously sent to a cloud server and then to the caregiver to aid with searching.
The beacon comes in several forms including suitable for putting into a wallet or attached to a walking stick. In 45 out of 131 lost episodes, the caregivers were able to use the technology to help search for their relatives with dementia.
87% of caregivers thought that the iBeacon was easy to carry for the people with dementia and 82% observed that their relatives with dementia were willing to carry the iBeacon. 79% of caregivers were satisfied with the durability of the iBeacon and 75% thought that the designated mobile app was easy to use. In addition, 74% of caregivers trusted data security. The overall programme satisfaction rate was 85%, revealing that they held a positive view of using this technology in their daily lives to prevent getting lost.
Bluetooth beacons have evolved considerably over the last twelve years. Occasionally, we see Twitter comments such as ‘Remember iBeacon’ or ‘Beacons are dead’. Beacons aren’t dead. They are used in many situations and have, in some cases, evolved such that you don’t even know they are being used.
Bluetooth 4.0 devices started with the Bluetooth 4.0 specification in December 2010. The iPhone 4S and many Android devices were the first iOS device to use this new wireless protocol. Interoperability with smartphones is one the main reasons Bluetooth LE and beacons have become so popular.
While there were a few early, custom, Bluetooth LE devices that just advertised, the popularity of beacons was boosted by the announcement of the iBeacon protocol at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 2013.
The First iBeacons
The iBeacon protocol actually didn’t add that much because it just used the standard Bluetooth 4.0 protocol with the data being interpreted in a particular way to uniquely identify the beacon. The important part was that iPhones would have CoreLocation APIs to detect these kinds of Bluetooth 4.0 devices.
Apple’s example usecases were mainly marketing, retail and consumer driven and this led to lots of startups creating new iBeacon platforms often with re-badged iBeacons with locked-in Software as a Service.
Google didn’t want to loose out but and their ambitions were wider in that they wanted to create what they called a Physical Web where smartphones could find and control devices using Bluetooth. The Eddystone profile was released by Google in July 2015 which, again, was a thin layer on top of the standard Bluetooth 4.0 protocol. Again, the important part was the software, provided by Google, that allowed Eddystone to trigger events in the Android Chrome and Android itself via the Play Services component.
A key part of Eddystone was Eddystone-URL that allowed the advertising of a shortened web address. However, the triggering mechanism was totally controlled by a Google server that had it’s own opaque rules and was frustrating because it didn’t always work.
Many more startups adapted their software and hardware designs to use Eddystone-URL. However, the spammy side of the marketing community took hold and by 25 October 2018, Google discontinued support for Android Bluetooth Nearby Notifications. This caused the end of a large number of startups based on beacon marketing.
During the ‘Eddystone age’ of 2015-2018 something longer lasting was happening. Some manufacturers adapted their beacons to become sensors for things like movement, temperature, humidity, air pressure, light, on/off, proximity, fall detection, smoke, natural gas and water leak. At the same time, manufacturers created gateways that sensed beacons and were able to send the Bluetooth advertising to a server via WiFi or Ethernet. Beacons started being used in industry for real time locating (RTLS) and IoT.
Bluetooth Mesh was adopted by the Bluetooth SIG in July 2017. This allowed beacons, or indeed any Bluetooth devices, to talk to each other such that a very large area can be covered with only one gateway at the edge. It’s now five years later and, apart from a few products related to lighting, Bluetooth Mesh hasn’t been popular.
Bluetooth Mesh
The main problem is that the Bluetooth Mesh standard was, for some reason, designed for usecases such as lighting that are low latency, low throughput and are mains powered. Bluetooth Mesh in beacons uses significant battery power and the throughput is too small for most IoT mesh applications having larger numbers of sensors.
Bluetooth Direction Finding was introduced with Bluetooth 5.1 in January 2019. The Angle of Arrival (AoA) variant works by having a beacon send out special advertising that is picked up by a multi-antenna locator.
Locator with multiple antennas
It’s now two and half years since the Bluetooth 5.1 release and some products have come to the market. However, most are evaluation boards that are not suitable for use in production. The software required to analyse the AoA radio data is very complex and performance-critical which has held back quick adoption.
LocationEngine™ Spectrum Analysis
Today, beacons are used in a vary large number of situations. For example, our customers use beacons for warehouse pallet tracking, factory job tracking, train company asset tracking, locating 2-way radios, healthcare asset tracking, tracking the elderly patients, man down SOS, lone working, evidence-based policing, smart offices, location-based gaming, car driving logging, facilities maintenance tracking, cargo temperature monitoring, student attendance monitoring and general IoT sensing. There are also a few consumer-facing uses but these tend to aid rather than spam consumers. Examples include restaurant table locating, museums and galleries.
In the future we expect we might see AoA and it’s sister technology Angle of Departure (AoD) mature. We are seeing beacons being used more in AR and immersive experiences so they might even have application in metaverses to help bridge the physical and virtual. It’s difficult to say how inflation and recession will affect innovation using Bluetooth. On the one hand companies will be spending less but on the other companies are seeking ways to measure and automate to save costs as part of Industry 4.0. Whatever happens, expect to continue to see beacons being used as part of larger solutions rather than the original premise of them being a (marketing) solution.
We have the new, small KKM F1 beacon in stock. This beacon is different because it’s rechargeable, offering 4-6 months use per charge, based on 1 sec advertising.
It’s also waterproof to IP67 and has a button that can be used for SOS to send out different advertising. This beacon also has an accelerometer for motion triggered broadcasting.
It’s charged using a USB cable with a magnetic connector.
Nordic Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) in many beacons, has published the latest online issue of Wireless Quarter Magazine. It showcases the many uses of Nordic SoCs.
The latest issue of the magazine highlights the use of the SoC in the following Bluetooth solutions:
A smart animal tracking and management system.
A handheld device used by students to answer test questions, record their attendance, answer surveys and provide class feedback.
There are also some interesting articles on:
How Bluetooth IoT sensors are enabling insurers to manage risks and mitigate claims by advancing accident prediction and prevention.
An explanation of the global chip shortage, manufacturing challenges and mitigations.
How IoT data can be used with AI machine learning to improve decision-making.
Bluetooth direction finding uses locators that have multiple antennas. The antennas tend to be flat patches on a printed circuit board (PCB).
The antennas receive the same radio signal but at slightly different times based on the incident angle. This causes a phase difference in the received radio signal at each antenna.
Software is needed to process the radio signals from the antennas and calculate the incident angle. The radio signals are measured in terms of in-phase and quadrature components (IQ).
Processing the IQ signals isn’t easy because it requires taking account of the relative position of the antennas on the PCB, delays in switching between the antennas (there is only one radio receiver) and the use of complex-number arithmetic. The result is a power spectrum, the peak of which is the expected azimuth and elevation of the radio signal in two dimensions.
The finding of the peak also isn’t easy because it requires looping over lots of values to find the maximum. This is computationally time consuming especially as this has to be done many times per second for multiple locators.
Our LocationEngine™ is the first independent software to provide scalable IQ to location processing. It provides industry-leading accuracy, performance, security and reliability for Bluetooth® AoA direction finding. It’s currently compatible with the Minew AoA Kit but we are working with other manufacturers to support further hardware.
LocationEngine™ is designed in integrate into 3rd party systems to provide x, y, z and also area where locators cover more than one area. We supply PrecisionRTLS™ that uses this data to plot onto plans/maps, provide alerts and store historical data for later reporting.
We are increasingly seeing beacon manufacturers providing updated versions of their beacons, not to provide extra functionality but to instead simplify the designs so as to reduce the component count or use fewer or cheaper semiconductors. The semiconductor manufacture crisis has resulted in a shortage of semiconductors that has resulted in component shortages and price rises. Beacon re-designs are an attempt by manufacturers to keep prices lower and in some cases prevent an existential crisis for a particular beacon model.
System on a Chip (SoC)
Some manufacturers are using simpler versions of the System On a Chip (SoC). These typically have less memory or have less functionality. Often the more-capable functionality wasn’t even used in the older beacon variant. Other times, things can be done in software that were performed in hardware. There’s also a trend to remove crystals that provide timing and instead perform this in software. Some manufactures are switching between SoC hardware manufacturers, for example from Nordic to Texas Instruments that requires a total hardware and software re-design.
Care needs to be taken when purchasing beacons especially when purchasing just a few samples and much later purchasing a larger quantity. Changes in hardware design mean that you won’t necessary get the same behaviour. This can affect aspects such as range and battery life. Doing things in software rather than hardware often affects battery use. At BeaconZone we are taking special care to ensure that current stocks of items behave as previously, if necessary specifying a particular variant when re-stocking.
The Revuie-based system allows diners to create reviews including photos, video and a short 140 character comment. The detection of beacons ensures the Revuie reviews are only from people who have visited the restaurant.
