BTLE tags

[Michael Butash]

I've played some with the BLE RTLS tags from Kontact.io and others, and
find them all to be finicky around their solutions.  It didn't seem like
there was anything in the open realm when I last looked around 9mo ago,
they were all very bound to their vendor and solutions, from setup to
capabilities, even the cheap chinese clones on ebay.

We do managed security for various industries, including hospitals and
like, so we partnered with a vendor for a pretty cool wireless and BLE
location solution from a company called Mist Systems <https://www.mist.com/>,
which works with the ble tracking devices with an array of 9 directional
bluetooth radios (plus wifi!), and I bought essentially an assortment of
ble tags and beacons as a poc here.  I can't say any of the beacons seem to
work well themselves, and their setup apps are all quirky and/or just
broken (at least under android).  Kontact was the best, but their beacons
are HUGE.  I couldn't imagine doing these at large scale really with the
state of the tech today, but the mist ap's can do some cool things if the
rest of the industry could get it together.

I'd be curious to know what others are doing in this space, I sort of
shelved it after the customer lost interest and I found all the devices
annoying to deal with.  We have the Mist AP's deployed at our office that
can do some interesting things with the BLE device data, contact me offline
if interested in testing some of the features with the tech.

-mb

On Sun, Dec 24, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Ed <plug at 0x1b.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 24, 2017 at 10:09 AM, David Schwartz
> <newsletters at thetoolwiz.com> wrote:
> > There are several companies that make these little BTLE “tags” that can
> be
> > used for proximity detection.
> >
> > Some are passive (unpowered) and some are more active and require power.
> >
> > TrackR Bravo has small quarter-sized devices that are only as large as
> they
> > are because of the battery in them. They last for a year.
> >
> > EveryKey has little rectangular devices that have LiPo batteries in them
> > that need to be recharged weekly.
> >
> > The interesting thing is that from a functional standpoint, they’re
> pretty
> > much both doing the same thing.
> >
> > The difference is in the applications.
> >
> > TrackR’s business model is this: stick our tags on your stuff and you’ll
> be
> > able to find them esily if you lose any of them.
> >
> > EveryKey’s business model is similar: stick one of our tags on yourself
> and
> > you’ll be able to automatically log into any of your devices when you get
> > within range of them.
> >
> > Both are dependent on people running their app for their model to work.
> > TrackR’s model requires the world to be using their app, but EveryKey’s
> only
> > requires the equipment owner to be using their app.
> >
> > They’re the same proximity mechanisms at work, but opposite approaches
> that
> > lead to different use cases.
> >
> > They could probably be done with passive tags as well.
> >
> > These are both closed models — you have to use their software with their
> > devices. If you want to be able to, say, login to another app using
> > EveryKey, you need to wait for them to build that in.
> >
> > Are there any open-source tools or libraries where people are building
> > similar types of apps that work with any number of different types of
> tags?
> >
> > -David Schwartz
> >
>
>
> David - all Bluetooth low energy tokens need power (radio), and
> today's industrial models are good for 5 years - there are many
> manufacturers and infrastructure services, like https://kontakt.io.
> They break down into two camps, Apple and Google. Apple is of coursed
> behind their garden wall, Google's Eddystone is free to use but also
> geared to tie into Android and Google analytics - but you can roll
> your own, or go with alt integrators like Kontakt. see also
> https://google.github.io/physical-web/
>
> There is an open source frontend (originated from Kontakt) is
> essentially abandonware and may not have made the BLE4 to BLE5
> transition earlier this year. There are many libraries and they are
> free, also vendor libs (Nordic) - the BLE usb scanner fob from
> Adafruit was only windows for anything but raw capture. There may be a
> Wireshark plugin in the works - I haven't looked recently - updates
> appreciated.
>
> I've found BLE hard to work with (firmware updates) as there are many
> sources of interference for an essentially weak signal, like usb3
> ports and wifi.  Great excuse for that Faraday room we've all been
> planning.
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