How Power and Advertising Interval Affect Battery Use

Nordic Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) in most beacons has a useful online calculator that helps work out the battery current used when advertising or when connected.

You need to set the SoC chip type (see the specification for the beacon you are using), voltage (3v as it’s usually a coin cell), DCDC (usually off), clock (usually external) and tx payload (set to 31 bytes). You can then vary the role (advertising or connected), power and advertising interval to see the affect on the battery current.

Dividing the battery capacity by the current will gives the approximate battery life. The resultant battery life calculation will be a very rough approximation and will be less if the manufacturer has added extra circuitry such as sensors. The online calculator is best used to get an appreciation of how changing parameters or the SoC type affects battery life rather than being a definitive value. For more accurate battery use it’s necessary to measure the actual battery current.

Completely New nRF Connect for iOS

As we have previously mentioned, nRF Connect is the the best app for detecting if a Bluetooth LE device such as a beacon is working. The Android version has always had more features than the iOS version but that is changing. nRF Connect for iOS has been completely re-written and now has a very pretty UI.

We still recommend using the Android rather than the iOS version because iOS apps can’t see Bluetooth MAC addresses due to some peculiar decisions made by people at Apple. Scanning also can’t see an iBeacon UUID, major and minor in the advertising. It’s more difficult to uniquely identify Bluetooth devices in apps such as nRF Connect on iOS than it is on Android.

The Affect of Power Levels on Wireless Indoor Localisation Accuracy

There’s new research by Umair Mujtaba Qureshi, Zuneera Umair and Gerhard Petrus Hancke of the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong on Evaluating the Implications of Varying Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Transmission Power Levels on Wireless Indoor Localization Accuracy and Precision. The paper takes a deep look into the relationship between transmitted power and signal stability. It also looks at ways of filtering received signal strength (RSSI) data to improve the location accuracy.

The main insight is that along with the expected difference in the RSSI attenuation there is a considerable difference in the BLE signal variation at all transmission power levels with respect to distance. The variation increases and the localisation accuracy decreases from high to low transmission power levels:

Another observation is that outliers in the data tend to affect the localisation accuracy. Applying filters to the data, they achieved a location accuracy of 2.2 meters with a precision of 95%.

One comment we have is that the researchers didn’t try different beacons. As we mentioned in 2016, the RSSI stability also varies across different beacon models.

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EgiGeoZone Geofence for Android

EgiGeoZone Geofence is a useful app for Android with over 10,000 users that allows you set up triggering based on location. There’s also a Bluetooth version that allows triggering in the vincinity of iBeacons.

The app is also open source on GitHub. Note that the app doesn’t yet work with the Android 8.0 background changes. The author is hoping someone else will fork the code and keep the app alive.

Bluetooth Mesh for Industrial IoT (IIoT)

There’s an informative video presentation on the Bluetooth SIG web site on Simplifying Multi-Vendor Mesh and Sensor Networks. It provides an introduction to Bluetooth mesh and explains the ways in which it can provide for Industrial IoT (IIoT).

To add to this, Bluetooth Mesh is suitable for use on the factory floor where the environment can be electrically noisy. Standard Bluetooth Mesh uses advertising on several channels rather than (GATT) connections so as to provide for more reliable communication in environments with wireless interference.

Read about Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)
Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh

Bluetooth Positioning Using Separate Bluetooth Channels

While we wait for commercial Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding solutions to become available, people are trying to refine traditional locating methods to gain more accuracy. Baichuan Huang, Jingbin Liu, Wei Sun and Fan Yang have a research paper on A Robust Indoor Positioning Method based on Bluetooth Low Energy with Separate Channel Information.

They have observed that the stability of the received Bluetooth signal strength RSSI depends on which Channel 37, 38 or 39 the signal is being received on. This is because the channels slightly overlap the WiFi channels and there can be other Bluetooth devices also using the same channels.

The method analyses the channels over time and chooses those it thinks has least interference and most stable RSSI. This reduces the positioning error by 0.2m, to 2.2m, at a distance of 3.6m.

Read about Determining Location Using Bluetooth Beacons

iOS 13 Location Permission Complexities

Following on from our post on Using Beacons with iOS 13 and Estimote’s post on Get ready for iOS 13: Bluetooth and location changes explained, TechCrunch has an article on how Developers accuse Apple of anti-competitive behavior with its privacy changes in iOS 13.

The gist of the problem is that the ‘Always’ option for allowing the location-tracking permission has become ‘Allow Once’ with the ‘Always’ option being
buried in iOS Settings. People who use location (and beacon) oriented apps, are likely to select the ‘Allow Once’ option and the app will only work correctly once. This will create extra support, customer confusion and general loss of customers. The anti-competitive part comes through Apple’s own in-built apps (currently) not having to live with these restrictions.

To mitigate against the problem we recommend app authors update their apps and online instructions to explain to users to at least initially select ‘Allow While Using App’ and possibly provide more detailed instructions how to set ‘Always’ in Settings.

Bluetooth KNOB Attack is for Classic Bluetooth, not Bluetooth LE

There’s a Bluetooth security vulnerability story doing the rounds that, according to the security researchers:

…affects basically all devices that “speak Bluetooth”

This isn’t true. The vulnerability relates to Bluetooth BR/EDR, so called ‘Classic Bluetooth’, and not Bluetooth LE. It isn’t found in beacons or other devices communicating via Bluetooth LE. It also isn’t found in Bluetooth mesh.

Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh

Cleaner Staff Tracking with iBeacons

There’s a new solution to track cleaning staff that provides app and web source code to implement a cleaning staff tracking system using iBeacons:

Android screens
Web interface

Manage beacons, buildings, zones and broadcast messages. The web interface shows staff activity and allows staff to be assigned to tasks. Staff can update task status and provide notes from their smartphones.

This solution has been added to the BeaconZone Solutions Directory where you can find more solutions that work with generic beacons.

Bluetooth Mesh, Thread and Zigbee Network Performance

Silicon Labs have a useful web site, webinar and slides on “Benchmarking Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, and Zigbee Network Performance”.

The two main measures of performance are throughput, the rate data transfer that can be achieved (in bits per second) and latency, the time taken for data to cross the network.

With a typical implementation of 6+ hops, throughput converges to a similar order of magnitude for all the protocols:

In real use these protocols only support of the order of low thousands of bits (not bytes!) per sec and should therefore only be used for sending small amounts of data that don’t change very often.

For a small payload with 192 nodes, Zigbee has lowest latency and Bluetooth has greatest variation of latency of 20ms to 200ms:

For a larger payload, the Bluetooth latency has a larger range of up to 750ms:

Whether the variation of latency matters depends on your particular solution. Which technology is best depends on what you need to accomplish. For example, in a Bluetooth lighting scenario you might not want some lights to come on immediately and far ones to come on up to a second later. For sensing, the delay usually doesn’t matter.

You also need to consider other factors such as interoperability, scalability, security, reliability and ease of deployment. For example, Zigbee is less scalable and Silicon Labs recommends a maximum of seven hops otherwise the network becomes congested due to re-tries. Bluetooth has especially good interoperability because it is ubiquitous on smartphones and other devices. It also works reliably in industrial situations and has double encryption.

All protocols can be difficult to deploy due to the lack of off-the-shelf general solutions outside specific verticals such as lighting and home automation.

Silicon Labs have a more specific paper on Bluetooth Mesh Network Performance.

Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh