BeaconZone Blog – Page 59 – iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms

USB Beacons for Fixed Installations

Beacons are often placed in shops, offices and other buildings for detection in smartphone apps. Battery powered beacons last from months to years depending on the size of the battery and the transmission power (adjustable). The compromise between battery life and physical range can be avoided if USB beacons are used instead.

USB beacons are powered from an available wallsocket, laptop, desktop or other standard USB socket. Alternatively, they can be powered using an inexpensive mains charger used to charge a smartphone or other device. Powering from the mains allows the beacon to be permanently set to full power with no worry about checking or changing the battery.

The use of mains power also allows for use of specialist beacons that output the maximium legally allowed (Class 1) power that wouldn’t be feasible using battery power.

The FSC-BP109 can be received up to 1000m on Android and 4000m on iOS.

View USB beacons

Measuring Occupancy for Social Distancing

Governments are increasingly mandating workplace indoor occupancy limits due to the Coronavirus pandemic. This is especially so in education where the risk of reduced social distancing is being mitigated with occupancy limits.

Occupancy is the number of people that are currently inside a building, room or zone. Measuring occupancy manually requires significant effort, additional staff, is error prone and is difficult to achieve, especially when there are multiple entrances and exits.

It’s for this reason, we are seeing organisations starting to use automated approaches. Real time locating systems (RTLS) such as our BeaconRTLS™ use Bluetooth beacons on people and gateways in rooms/zones to track who is where. The resultant data provides for accurate current and historical occupancy.

Once you have a system in place it has lots of other uses:

Finding people
Locating staff for safety and evacuation
Finding expensive assets shared amongst staff
Providing alerts if things move when they shouldn’t
Detecting when collisions occur between vehicles/racking
Tracing of parts, sub-assemblies and physical orders
Supporting IoT sensing including light, temperature, humidity, water leak, gas
Creating big data for use with AI to provide insights using patterns the data

Making More Sense of Bluetooth Advertising Scans

When working with Bluetooth beacons and/or gateways and looking at raw Bluetooth data it can often become confusing which device is which. When setting up beacons using manufacturers’ apps, it’s a common occurrence for our customers to mistakenly connect to smartphones or fitness trackers rather than a beacon and wonder why the connection doesn’t work.

RaMBLE is a useful Android app that helps decode the Bluetooth devices around you. It attempts to classify devices so you can identify them:

The scanning runs in background and also logs advertising so that the data can be exported for analysis.

Bluetooth Gateways for AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub and Google IoT Core

It never been easier to collect Bluetooth sensor information and store it in the cloud. The INGICS gateways come with step-by-step instructions how to set up AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub and Google IoT Core.

View Bluetooth Sensor Beacons

UK NHS Covid-19 Contact Tracking Source Code Available

The UK NHS has just released the Android and iOS source code for the UK NHS Covid-19 contact tracking app. This is the code used before the recent switch to the Google/Apple mechanism.

The iOS readme explains how it works:

Our unique identifier is also known as our service characteristic. In the Bluetooth spec, devices can broadcast the availability of services. Each service can have multiple characteristics. We use a characteristic to uniquely identify our service and distinguish from all other sorts of Bluetooth devices. For every device we find with a matching characteristic, we record an identifier for the device we saw, the timestamp, and the RSSI of the Bluetooth signal, which will allow a team later on to determine who was in close proximity to individuals infected with the novel coronavirus

Indigo Mac Home Automation Uses iBeacons

One of our customers McPartners in the Netherlands has been using piBeacon with Indigo to provide for home automation on the Mac. You can read their success story on the Indigo forums.

They started using beacon instead of RFID because RFID cards they were using were becoming more expensive than iBeacons and becoming scarce. They wanted tags they could second source, have a long battery life, long range and easy setup.

They have found the Indigo/piBeacon combination reliable, fast and have told us it works with all the Axaet, AnkhMaway and Minew beacons purchased from us.

Mist WiFi Access Points Broadcast as Bluetooth Beacons

WiFi access points are increasingly supporting the broadcast of Bluetooth beacon signals. The main usecase is to allow for smartphone apps to detect the Bluetooth advertising and provide for location based information and navigation.

We recently learnt that Mist access points support the advertising of iBeacon and Eddystone:

There are also some interesting uses in retail that automatically provision smartphone WiFi access settings based on the detected presence of a beacon.

UK Moves to Google-Apple Social Distancing API

Just under a month ago we wrote about Bluetooth RSSI, Social Distancing and Contact Tracing and how the UK Government was going their own way:

Google and Apple have implemented a new API to allow contact tracing apps to work well on iOS and Android. Some Governments, such as ours in the UK, have currently gone their own way with apps that use existing APIs. Such aforementioned restrictions stop smartphones seeing each other thus severely reducing their effectiveness. The apps won’t work properly and will provide very limited benefit.

We are not surprised that Sky News is reporting that there has now been a U-turn.

To all governments trying to use the standard iOS and Android APIs to measure social distancing and perform contact tracing: You are wasting important time.

Read about Beacons for Workplace Social Distancing and Contact Tracing

TRBOnet 5.5 Released

A new version of TRBOnet has been released. TRBOnet is usually used with Motorola TRBO 2-way radio to provide control room facilities. Beacons can be placed across a site, the 2-radio detects them and TRBOnet plots them onto maps or plans.

This release additionally allows Android and iOS smartphones to be used as personal safety devices sending SOS to the TRBOnet control panel with location information. The app also allows push to talk (PTT) over cellular and sending of pictures to the control centre.

TRBO.SOS includes other advanced personal safety features, such as Man Down, Lone Worker and No Movement

Ignition Supports Bluetooth Beacons

Ignition is a HMI/SCADA system used for factory machine control and monitoring. It uses web-based technology running on an on-site server. It’s configured using a drag and drop user interface to provide HMI/SCADA controls, dashboards, historical trending, database access, reporting, alarming, security, sequential function charts, redundancy and failover control.

Ignition 8.0 has support for Bluetooth in the Perspective App running on mobile devices. It reads iBeacon and Eddystone formats. This allows for functionality based on location.