IoT Sensing Without Soldering

There are a lot of ways of doing sensing that mostly include development boards, wires and soldering. Even if you use prototyping or breadboards, your final solution is rarely ready for real use or production without then creating a custom electronics solution.

Sensor beacons provide for IoT sensing where all of the developed solution can be in software. The beacons send data via Bluetooth preventing the need for wires and soldering, even in production solutions. All you need is the receiving software in an app, laptop, desktop or other computer where you can receive data and if necessary send it on to servers.

What’s more, the use of low power Bluetooth allows you to place the sensors in locations where there’s no mains power. Batteries in the beacons can last 5 years or more depending on the sensor sampling frequency.

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Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Machine Learning Sensor Data

Mobile World Live, the media arm of the GSMA, has a new article titled IoT data impossible to use without AI.

The article title is over-dramatic because IoT data can be used without AI. However, as the article goes on to say, AI is …

‘vital to unlocking the “true potential” of IoT’

… that has more truth.

As usual, these things are said with no example or context. Let’s look at a simple example.

Let’s say we want to use x y z accelerometer data from one of our sensor beacons to measure a person’s movement. If we wanted to know if the person is falling we could test for limits on the x y z. This doesn’t use AI. Now consider if we want to know if person is walking, standing, running, lying down (their ‘posture’). You can look at the data forever looking for right patterns of data. Even if you found a pattern, it probably wouldn’t work with a different person. AI machine learning provides a solution. A simplistic explanation is that it can take recordings of x y z of these postures from multiple people and create a model. This model can then be used with new data to classify the posture.

AI solves problems that previously seemed too complex and impossible to solve by humans. Solving such problems often improves efficiency, saves costs, increases competitiveness and can even create new intellectual property for your organisation.

However, don’t automatically turn to AI to make sense of sensor data. Don’t over-complicate things if the data can be analysed using conventional programming.

Machine Learning with Beacons

Open Source iBeacon CMS

There’s often the requirement to show data triggered by beacons detected by iOS and Android apps. There are many SaaS subscription systems to do this for you but what if you want to host the data yourself or have a large number of beacons where SaaS solutions aren’t economically viable?

You could create your own CMS. However, take a look at SBCMS. SMCMS provides a simple open source CMS that can be hosted on your own server or automatically on a Heroku cloud server instance.

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Trigger Data and Beacon Servers

Software Development Services

Wiliot Set to Disrupt the Beacon Industry

Last week we met with Steve Statler, better known as Mr Beacon. Steve has joined Wiliot at their SVP Marketing & Business Development.

Wiliot are interesting because they have the potential to disrupt the beacon industry. They have secured $19m in funding to create ultra thin beacons that use energy harvesting rather than batteries. In order to do this, they will become a semiconductor company much like Nordic, TI, Dialog and NXP whose system on a chip (SoC) products are used in existing beacons. Wiliot will create their own SoC that will be packaged much like current NFC tags that can be stuck onto things.

Proof of concepts are scheduled for 2H 2018 with production in mid 2019. The aim is to sell millions of these things in products such as clothing, packaging, electronics and toys. This scale will mean they will only cost of the order of tens of cents/euros/pounds. While Wiliot expect their beacons to be manufactured into things, they expect to offer stand-alone ‘stickers’ that can be attached to anything. They also plan versions with sensors that might also disrupt the IoT industry.

Energy harvesting will take energy from the airwaves from WiFi and similar 2.4GHz products, including ironically, other beacons! They won’t get much energy this way so the range will be small, a few meters, for initial devices. They aim to improve the range in later product iterations, presumably through the use of better energy storage devices such as supercapacitors.

We will be following Wiliot, hope to stock their products and will be offering consultancy and development based on their technology.

Bluetooth 5 Simultaneous Multiple PHY

If you have been following our posts on Bluetooth 5, you might be wondering how one Bluetooth device can communicate to many devices, some of which might be legancy Bluetooth 4.

There’s a new video from Nordic Semiconductor (who produce the System on a Chip – SoC – inside most beacons) where the new long range mode is used while connecting to up to 20 devices. These can be different PHYs meaning that different capabilities, for example high speed vs long range vs legacy) can be connected at the same time.

New Ultra Low Power Bluetooth Transmitter Chip

All beacons are currently based on System on a Chip devices that are essentially small computers. While they are low power, it’s possible to create Bluetooth transmitters that are just electronics with no computing element and thus significantly reduce development effort (for the beacon manufacturer) and save substantial battery power for the end user.

Asahi Kasei Microdevices Corporation has announced the AK1594, a new Bluetooth® Low Energy Transmission IC. As there’s nothing to connect to via GATT, settings are configured via EEPROM programming and external switching rather than via an app. It consumes only 9.1uA when transmitting 0dBm every 1 sec.

Asahi Kasei Microdevices Corporation also mention a new beacon, from Houwa System Design, the Beacon Tag BLEAD® Series that will use the new chip and will be available from May 2018.

9.1uA is very low current for a beacon and is the order of magnitude a normal beacon uses when it isn’t advertising. This low power requirement will allow beacons to operate for effectively the physical rather than electrical life of the battery that’s probably of the order of a decade. It also allows new types of beacon to be created that use RF or solar energy harvesting.

Setup via EEPROM programming isn’t that easy or possible for end users and we expect initial beacons based on this technology will have fixed iBeacon advertising with only settings like power and advertising period set via switches.

Update on Bluetooth 5 and Beacons

It’s nearly a year since we wrote about Bluetooth 5 Beacon Implementation Tradeoffs.

Since then, the Samsung S8, iPhone 8/X, and Google Pixel 2 have been released that support Bluetooth 5. However, while these support the LE 2M high speed PHY they don’t support the longer range PHYs. There are currently no smartphones that can take advantage of Bluetooth 5’s longer range.

There are few true Bluetooth 5 beacons. Most that say they are Bluetooth 5 ‘ready’ or ‘compatible’ are only compatible to the extent that their firmware can be upgraded in the future.

An exception is SNCF, the French train company, who are manufacturing their own beacons in order to start experimenting with Bluetooth 5. As mentioned in the Mr Beacon video, SNCF are looking to Bluetooth 5 to provide for (up to x4) better beacon battery life. How is this possible, especially as the SoC chips themselves (usually nRF52 or TI CC2640) are the same whether they run Bluetooth 4 or 5? The battery current is actually the same. Bluetooth LE devices consume most power when actually transmitting and negligible power inbetween transmissions. The faster data rate allows the Bluetooth device to transmit the same data over less time thus using less battery power.

AB Wireless Gateway V2 Available

We have the AB BLE Gateway in stock. This improves on the original AB Wireless Gateway in that it provides double the throughput, detecting 50 beacons/sec.

Gateways are the glue that makes beacons part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and enable real time positioning and sensing.

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Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)