iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
We have the new Minew G1 gateway in stock. The G1 gateway collects advertising data from iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth LE sensor and other Bluetooth LE devices and sends it to your server by HTTP(S) or MQTT/ using WiFi or Ethernet.
Special features of this gateway are that that it supports both WiFi and Ethernet and has a high throughput of up to 200 Bluetooth LE devices detected per second.
We have a selection of beacons that are powered from USB. However, up until now, very few of them have been controllable via USB.
We now stock the Minew U1 that has a CP2104 USB Serial converter that causes the device to show as a serial COM port device. This allows you to control it from other devices such as PCs, laptops, Linux or Android, as well as from the iOS/Android apps.
Why might you want to do this? Scenarios such as use with digital signage and video walls in shopping malls and stadiums sometimes need the beacon advertising to change in real-time as the display information changes. UART connected beacons allows the beacon advertising to be changed by the host device.
ABI Research predicts that there’s going to be an increase in beacon-enabled app shipments mainly due to retail and ambient intelligence:
So what is ambient intelligence? It’s a catch all term for the joining of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, the connected home, wearables, smartphones, voice/image recognition and artificial intelligence through machine learning.
Sensor beacons enable the gathering of new data. New data not only measures physical things but, more importantly, provides a way of circumventing the problem of silo data in many large organisations. Silo data is data people/departments don’t want to share for fear of losing power or control. Today’s machine learning techniques also require data to be in a specific format and ‘clean’. Creating new data allows it to be more readily formatted and conditioned prior to saving.
This isn’t just about location data. It includes physical quantities such as smaller-scale movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate and fall detection. Our conversations with beacon manufacturers tell us beacons are currently being developed that detect more nuanced quantities such as colour, gas and UV. Some beacons already have general purpose input/output (GPIO) such that custom beacons can can already detect anything for which there’s an electronic sensor.
So why Bluetooth beacons rather than other electronics with the same sensors? Here are the main reasons:
There’s an article in The Manufacturer magazine on “Manufacturing:the numbers” that highlights some numbers from the Hennik Research’s Annual Manufacturing Report.
In practice, we are finding many organisations are struggling to develop skills, business processes and organisational willpower to implement 4IR. There’s a relatively slow pace in many industries, driven down by the uncertainties of Brexit, Europe and International trading tensions.
Nevertheless, we believe that once these political issues start to play out, the more forward-thinking manufacturers will realise they have to revolutionise their processes in order to compete in an market with complex labour availability and tighter margins due to tariffs. Manufacturers that are able to harness 4IR effectively will be the ones that will be able to differentiate themselves, while the laggards will find themselves more and more at a disadvantage.
Read about Sensing for Industry and IoT
Read about Machine Learning
There’s a type of beacon that doesn’t send out iBeacon or Eddystone advertising. Instead, it sends out standard Bluetooth 4.0 advertising containing sensor values. This means the data can be picked up via apps, gateways, Raspberry Pis or other devices that can see Bluetooth advertising.
An example of this is the INGICS iBS01 range of beacons.
The round bit in the middle is a button that can be pressed. Here’s an example for the data from the iBS01T temperature/humidity sensor:
Additionally, the ‘event’ data gives the state of the button press.
Important: This web page is provided for historical purposes.
On 25 October 2018, Google announced they are discontinuing Nearby Notifications on Android. This mechanism should no longer be used.
Read about using Beacons for Marketing
Google has removed the Android Physical Web app from the Play Store. This provided a way of scanning for Eddystone beacons without relying on the built-in Android Nearby functionality. As previously mentioned, the Google Physical web team was disbanded. Google have now removed the app, presumably because there’s no-one to maintain it in tandem with new versions of Android. Here’s the final Android Physical Web APK if you wish to side-load the file.
The iOS Physical Web app is also no longer available. The iOS version wasn’t written by Google and has recently been taken over by the non-profit Physical Web Association.
Motorola MOTOTRBO range two-way Radios can be used with the Motorola-supplied TRBOnet PLUS (pdf) control room software to show the location of workers with digital radios on maps and plans. The radios contain both GPS and iBeacon detection to allow locating indoors.
There are three places where iBeacons need to be set up in TRBOnet:
In the GPS profile:
Placing beacon on the map:
Are you an established 2-way radio company?
Contact us for advice on which beacons we have supplied for use with TRBONet.
Read the full User Guide
View compatible beacons
People often come to us with the wrong impression how iBeacon apps can work. They think an app can sit in the background and suddenly come to the foreground when an iBeacon is detected. If you think about it, no 3rd party apps work like this, taking over your screen, and for good reason. It’s seen as intrusive by users and both iOS and Android prevent this. Instead, apps need to show a notification which, if tapped on, goes to the app or a screen within the app.
On iOS, apps don’t actually do the detecting of beacons. iOS detects beacons with ids that have been pre-declared by the app. When an app isn’t running, iOS starts the app for only a short time to allow it to show a notification.
On Android, prior to Android 8, you could have a background service scanning for beacons. However, Android has become more like iOS. Newer Android ‘Doze’ and background restrictions mean you have to use newer Bluetooth APIs to detect beacons when the app isn’t running.
A little known, under-promoted use of iBeacons is with Apple Passkit. Passkit allows you to create and distribute things like coupons, boarding passes, store cards, event tickets, promotions, offers or just information that can end up in the built-in iOS Wallet app. After adding a pass into the wallet, a user can get a notification about the pass when they are near an iBeacon associated with the pass, all without installing an app. There are lots of uses particularly in retail, events and hospitality.
The Apple developer documentation explains how the Wallet works and the passkit reference shows the iBeacon related set up fields.
An important thing to realise is that the beacon doesn’t send the pass to the smartphones. They just cause the triggering. You need to provide a mechanism, usually via a web site, where users can download the pass from your web server. Your server must be secure (HTTPS) and use a SSL certificate from a known certificate authority. Self-signed certificates won’t work. You will also have to set your server to serve the application/vnd.apple.pkpass MIME type when hosting the pass file.
There’s a useful example by Tom Harrington who shows how he created a Passbook Business Card. If you are not a technical person and it all looks too complicated, PassKit Inc (nothing to do with Apple) have a platform based on Apple Wallet.
Apple Passkit works with all iBeacons.
Customers often ask us the accuracy when locating beacons. In order to get the answer, its necessary to understand different ways of locating and the tradeoffs that are needed to get the different levels of accuracy.
There are two types of locating, received signal strength (RSSI) based and angle of arrival direction finding (AoA).
There are two main scenarios. The first is a where the detector, usually a phone or gateway, is at a known location and the beacon moves. The second is where the beacons are fixed and the detector moves. Either way, the detector receives a unique beacon id and the receiving electronic circuitry provides the strength of the received signal.
The value of the RSSI can be used to infer the distance from the detector to the beacon. The main problem with RSSI is that it varies too much, over time, to be used to accurately calculate distance. The direction also isn’t known when there’s only one beacon and one detector. The varying RSSI, even when nothing is moving, is caused by the Bluetooth radio signals that are reflected, deflected by physical obstacles and interfered with by other devices using similar radio frequencies. Physical factors such as the room, the beacon not uniformly emitting across a range of 360 degrees, walls, other items or even people can affect the received signal strength. How the user holds a detecting phone can affect the effectiveness of the antenna which in turn affects the signal strength.
The varying RSSI can be smoothed by averaging or signal processing, such as Kalman filtering, to process multiple RSSI values over time. The direction not being known can be solved by using trilateration where three gateways (or beacons depending on the above mentioned scenario) are used to determine the distance from three directions and hence determine the 2D location.
Trilateration
The aforementioned physical factors that affect RSSI can be reduced by measuring the actual RSSI at specific locations and hence calibrating the system.
The change of RSSI with distance is greater when the beacon is near the detector. At the outer reaches of the beacon signal, the RSSI varies very little with distance and it’s difficult to know whether the variance is due to a change of distance or radio noise. Hence for systems that use signal processing, trilateration and calibration tend to achieve accuracies of about 1.5m within a shorter range confined space and 5m at the longer distances.
However, such systems have problems. The multiple RSSI values needed for averaging or signal processing mean that you either have to wait a while to get a location fix or have the beacons transmit more often (with a shorter period) that flattens their batteries much sooner. Trilateration requires at least three devices per zone so can be costly and require significant time to setup and maintain. Using calibration is like tuning a performance car. It works well until something small changes and it needs re-tuning. If someone adds a room partition, desk or even something as simple as lots of people in the room, the calibration values become invaid. Re-calibration takes human effort and, pertinently, it’s not always easy to know when it needs re-tuning.
An alternative to trilateration is zoning. This involves putting a detector (or beacon depending on the above mentioned scenario) in each room or zone. The system works out the nearest detector or beacon and can work on just one RSSI value to get a fix quickly. The nearest zone is often all that’s required of most implementations. With zoning, if you need more accuracy in a particular zone you add more detectors in the area to get up to the 1.5m accuracy of other methods. This will obviously be impractical if you need 1.5m accuracy everywhere over a large area.
BeaconRTLS™ area zones
An alternative to trilateration and zoning is more expensive Bluetooth hardware and more complex software that makes use of Angle of Arrival (AoA). Locator hardware with multiple antennas uses Bluetooth Direction Finding to find assets to better than 1m accuracy. Location engine software uses the difference in the time of receiving the signals at multiple antennas to calculate the position. Multiple locators can also be used to cover larger areas and/or improve the accuracy using triangulation.
Unlike RSSI systems where any beacons can be used, locators tend to be tied to using the same manufacturers’ beacons. The complex hardware and software has less throughput and supports fewer beacons. The computing hardware needs to be more powerful. Systems need careful, accurate site measurements to achieve good accuracy.
Choosing a solution just because it is more accurate, rather than needed, will cost significantly more not just in hardware but in software cost, setup effort and maintenance. Work out what accuracy you need and then seek out an appropriate solution.