Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

We’ve been developing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) hardware, firmware, and software since 2014 at the IoT Design Shop. While these projects have taken on a number of different domains and problem sets, none has been pervasive as the “Beacon” use case for Bluetooth LE.

These beacons, sometimes called “iBeacon” if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, or “Eddystone” from the Google ecosystem are fairly simple BLE transmitters that will broadcast unique ID and a small data payload in Bluetooth packets. Smartphones, laptops, wearables, and other devices can receive these transmissions and use them to uniquely identify the beacon that is sending the data.

SIGNUL Beacons

IoT Design Shop has designed, developed, and shipped a custom, personal beacon system what we call SIGNUL. This product was designed from the ground up in house, and is still currently assembled in-house at the IoT Design Shop today, featuring our hardware, software, and firmware in a consumer package.

Custom deployment or firmware can be created for the SIGNUL platform if desired. Likewise, specs on the advertising packets and how to program SIGNUL are available for licensed partners.

If you’d like to read more about the SIGNUL development process, check out our blog post on SIGNUL. Also, feel free to visit our SIGNUL-specific site at http://signul.io.

Custom Beacons and Hardware

IoT Core Test Grid

Our SIGNUL product line is based on an internal Bluetooth Low Energy module we call IoT Core. This board has been tested in a wide variety of different consumer electronic deployments and has been shipped worldwide with excellent reliability and performance characteristics.

The design of the IoT Core BLE board is such that it can be easily adapted to be interfaced to other electronic devices, and supports a variety of power and installation options with only minor tweaks to the build. We offer SDK support, as well as custom firmware for the board.