iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Sensorberg has a great new video that provides inspiration regarding what’s possible in the smart workspace:
This video also provides a learning for marketers. As with all the best ideas (and promotion), it’s often best not to mention how things are achieved – in this case predominantly using beacons. People don’t need to know this and are more interested in what it does, the benefits and how it makes people feel.
We coincidentally had two customers last week with the same query and the same resolution. They wanted to know why their ultra long range beacons weren’t achieving the expected range.
It turns out both customers where expecting the beacons to transmit through obstacles. It’s important to understand what can block signals. When a signal gets blocked, there’s no point trying beacons with longer ranges in the hope they will push the signal through the physical obstructions. Longer range beacons only work long range when there is unobstructed line of sight such as in a large warehouse or event space.
In recent years there has been a movement towards software being provided “as a service” whether supplied free to induce users to buy/use other services/products or via a subscription model. The software provider usually gains through having a long term revenue stream. Companies gain easy access to ready-made and managed solutions to their problems. It all sounds perfect. However, there are risks in using Software as a Service (SaaS) that need to be understood and managed.
Creating an app or platform that integrates a 3rd party SaaS API ties you to that platform. If the platform is discontinued you have the complex task of re-writing to use the new API and migrating existing data. If there’s no similar alternative, you are faced with implementing the SaaS provided service for yourself.
Most SaaS providers are VC funded which means they tend to initially give away their APIs for free or at low cost to attract customers. Once shareholders start to want to see revenue, monthly fees increase. We are already seeing this with many beacon platform providers. Once Angel or VC funding runs out, platforms can disappear. A high profile example in the beacon ecosystem at the moment is Onyx.
The risks aren’t constrained to using VC funded companies’ services. Google has recently removed services related to the Physical Web. They are about to deprecate Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) that’s used in thousands if not millions of apps.
So what can you do? The first thing is do your due diligence. Is the company providing the SaaS you are considering likely to be around for the lifetime of your project? Is the company (like Google) renowned for deprecating services? Do you really need all the SaaS functionality or could you make do with a simpler developed or open source solution? Might you be able to use the SaaS for a proof of concept or minimum viable product (MVP) and plan to move to a developed solution?
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
There has been speculation that the Physical Web, as championed by Google, is dead.
Here’s what we know:
In summary, while new development on Physical Web is dead, the mechanism still works and Google is still applying fixes. Google has removed some functionality that was rarely used and has disbanded the Physical Web team. However, Google is still maintaining the Physical Web proxy and Eddystone notifications still work on Android.
Meanwhile, a group of people led by Agustin Musi from Switzerland is contemplating creating PhysicalWeb2. There’s a Slack channel you can join or you can email them at contactus@phwa.io. There’s also a new site at phwa.io.
Read about using beacons for marketing.
The latest Spring 2018 WirelessQ Magazine (pdf) from Nordic demonstrates some diverse uses of beacons. For example, it mentions the use of Beacons to open doors for the visually-impaired:
A later article in the magazine explains how Bluetooth Low Energy is rapidly
expanding into industrial markets:
“Bluetooth LE technology is growing far beyond its consumer roots by underpinning innovative solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things”
RSSI is the signal strength at the Bluetooth receiver. The signal type, for example, iBeacon, Eddystone or sensor beacon is irrelevant. The value of the RSSI can be used to infer distance.
The accuracy of the distance measurement depends on many factors such as the type of sending device used, the output power, the capability of the receiving device, obstacles and importantly the distance of the beacon from the receiving device.
The output power isn’t known to the receiver so it’s sometimes added to the advertising data in the form of the ‘measured power’ which is the power at 1m from the sender.
The closer the beacon is to the receiver, the more accurate the derived distance. As our article mentions, projects that get more detailed location derived from RSSI, usually via trilateration and weighted averages, usually achieve accuracies of about 5m within the full range of the beacon or 1.5m within a shorter range confined space.
There’s some Android Java code on GitHub if you want to experiment with extracting distance from RSSI. There’s an equation for iOS on GitHub.
Need more help? Consider a Feasibility Study.
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.
Read more:
Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)
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.
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.
Learn more:
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.