My Hardy Little Friend: Coding the Arduino in C++ - Choosing a development...

My Hardy Little Friend: Coding the Arduino in C++ - Choosing a development...: So now that we have decided what language to write the code in, we need to decide what development environment we want to use, and with th...

Test - Ingnore

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Beacon investigation

The hottest topic in retail at present has to be iBeacons, a technology that is firmly associated with Apple who have invested a lot of time in studying the use of beacons incorporating Bluetooth 4.0, otherwise known as Bluetooth LE. This, they hope, will provide retailers with a method of targeting customers based upon their location. The question is does it work? And what are it's limitations?

Working within the retail industry, these are questions I have spent the last two months investigating, and in this post I will explain the technology, and reveal the outcome of these investigations, whose purpose was to provide a solution to location aware applications within a store environment.

To start with let me explain the perceived advantages of iBeacons. With the advent of Bluetooth LE (low energy) it is now possible to build a radio beacon that can run for years off of a single cell battery, and the very low cost of the technology means that these beacons are likely to cost no more than a Dollar or two, effectively making them disposable, at the end of two years you simply throw the old one away and fit a new one.

Secondly unlike older Bluetooth, you don't need to pair them with the device using it, the basic idea is that devices using these beacons only need to 'see' them, read the identification header that they broadcast, and measure the signal strength. Another beauty of the BLE standard is that these devices are much faster at booting up when a device talks to them, this is because when Nokia originally started working on Bluetooth 4.0 they heavily reworked the header the these devices broadcast, reducing dramatically it's size.

All of that looks good, and in most of the new generation of Bluetooth devices, it has worked faultlessly, and delivered all the benefits that were expected, but the idea of using these devices to locate a device indoors is very new, and there have been teething problems.

One of the biggest issues that this technology faces is that it's being promoted as a cure all for all of your indoor location ills, and because of this there are very few use cases that those working with the technology can agree to focusing on.

The only model that has had any real focus is the proximity one, a model that has been championed by Apple themselves. This is the approach most people have seen in use in the Apple stores, and works on the idea that if you approach a particular part of the store, offers and suggestions are displayed on your phone or tablet. On the whole this has worked after a fashion, but even this limited use case has been fraught with problems, and it's very much hit and miss if the technology is functioning when you visit one of their stores.

The model I've spent the last two months looking into, has been the location, one that many seen to be working on, but nobody seems to have cracked. Trilateration is the buzzword here, a similar approach used in satellite based geolocation, but this doesn't seem to scale down well to the much smaller distances we are dealing with with indoor location. To make matters worse the signal currently achieved from BLE beacons is not very stable, and although companies working in this sector of the market, are trying to come up with noise reduction algorithms to get over this problem, none seem to have cracked it.

Talking to the companies in the forefront of iBeacon development, they see the sky as the limit, everything from replacing NFC, and RFID, to geo-fenced payment systems, this is a sector of the market were there are a lot of people talking a good fight. 

Some use this technology as the reason Apple have yet to include NFC into their range of smart phones, and tablets. I guess only time will tell, either this will overtake and eventually replace NFC as the contact-less payment system of choice, or a future iPhone will incorporate NFC, which most will see as an indication that iBeacons failed to produce everything that has been promised.

As for my research, well for the time being we are calling this technology in its infancy, we will keep an eye on what happens with it, but for indoor location services, that we can feel sure will work on whatever platform we choose, we'll turn to Google's indoor location services instead.

Tech commentators worth following - Roman Kozak

What's this series about?

In this series of posts, Commentators On Tech, I will highlight those lesser known Bloggers and Vloggers, whose work I think deserves more recognition than they are currently getting. I hope once you've read my review of them, you might check them out for yourself, and maybe spread the word.

So who am I reviewing today?

In this, the first post in the series, I'm going to take a look at Roman Kosak, a 10th grader who is regularly blogging and vlogging on some pretty impressive tech that he is personally involved with.   

How did I discover him?

I cannot claim to have discovered Roman by myself, I was directed to a tutorial he posted on YouTube about setting up and programming the Arduino controller to read RFID tags, but having watched that video, and then a number of others that he has posted, I think that this guy has a very bright future in technology. To say I was impressed is an understatement, with the content and production quality of his videos at a very high standard, he seems equally at home taking to the camera, as well as demonstration hardware and coding. 

So what does he do?

He describes himself as a 'Grade 10 student by day, Blogger, hacker and entrepreneur by night' and I would suggest that he is under selling himself, as he has already created a popular YouTube channel where he discusses, demonstrates, and gives tutorials on a range of subjects from the Arduino through to hydrogen fuel cells. He blogs on his own site, and posts regularly to Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and the content of all of these streams is always stuff that I am interested in reading about. 

So where can you find him?

My recommendation is to start with the place I first discovered him, YouTube, his channel has quite a few very interesting videos, and I'd recommend checking out some of his tutorials, well worth the time. His channel can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/RomanAKozak 

 

If your on Google+ why not check out his page at https://plus.google.com/105793209510483681202

On Twitter you'll find him at https://twitter.com/RomanAKozak

While on Facebook his page is https://www.facebook.com/romanandrewkozak

As mentioned he also has his own website, which I assume is currently in it's infancy, but check it out to see what else he is up to http://www.romanakozak.com/

Finally, as with all of the commentators I will be covering in this series, if you find his postings of interest please let him know, and encourage him to keep up the good work, and remember to share their links with your circles of friends and colleagues.  

 

Experiences with Google fuse location services.

Having tried for a prolonged period to get location via ibeacon working, with disappointing results (more about that in a future post), I've decided to give Google's fuse location service a try. Going down the beacon route wouldn't have been my first choice, but internal politics had, at the time, made using Google services all but impossible.

Before investing too much time on fuse location I have decided to test how effective it is in three already mapped locations, Waterloo railway station, John Lewis Oxford Street, and the British museum. The environment that I am developing for is probably closer to John Lewis, but testing a range of environments seems to be the best idea.

Location isn't the only issue I need to consider, platform is possibly more important, in particular the possibility of a system that can be used on a number of platforms, so for these tests I am using both an iPhone 5s and a Nexus 5.

The first environment tested in is Waterloo railway station, chosen in part because this is the station I come into every day. On arriving at the concourse I opened Google maps on the Nexus 5, and was immediately concerned and disappointed, the starting location that the Nexus gave me was at the far end of platform 1, almost the entire station away from where I was standing. Now I must disclose that the Nexus is the phone I currently use as my primary phone, and I know that my experience of mobile coverage using this phone at this location is often disappointing, so until I have tested this at all three locations I'll reserve judgement.

The iPhone however, bearing in mind that it was using the Nexus as a mobile hotspot, was very impressive, tracking my journey from one end of the concourse to the other with a consistent margin of only a couple of metres, and that margin was always the same bearing from where I stood. The location refresh was also very impressive, being almost real-time.

So in summary, ignoring the Nexus 5 for now, fuse location at Waterloo was very impressive, and definitely something that can be worked with. Next stop John Lewis Oxford Street.

Arriving at John Lewis and all concerns about the Nexus were blown away, using the in store WiFi on both phones, the position was tracked with a similar accuracy to that seen on the iPhone at Waterloo. Transitioning between floors was automatic for the Nexus, the iPhone needs you to select the floor your on, and apart from the third floor, I'm guessing the WiFi mapping might have been either in incomplete or out of date, neither phone skipped a beat.

In summary, at John Lewis, fuse location service behaved exactly as you'd want and expect it to, only gripe with the Nexus is that in Google maps the internal maps 'felt' zoomed in too much, an issue I don't expect to effect any apps written on the platform, using the fuse location service. Next stop the British museum.
Final stop on this fact finding mission, the British museum, and the one that I had been looking forward to, what a disappointment. Initially all looked as good as before, but as soon as you leave the central court yard the problems rapidly become apparent, art, antiquities and technology really do not mix.

Basically, for fuse location to have a fighting chance of giving an accurate position indoors it needs a decent Wi-Fi signal, and at the British museum Wi-Fi can be best described as patchy. Looking out for Wi-Fi access points, you fast realise that there don't appear to be any, I can only surmise that those running the museum did not want their exhibition spaces 'blighted' by unsightly tech, what a shame.

So to summarise, as an example of the fused location service, the British museum sucks. However in general across the three  environments, the service works incredibly well, and as far as my requirements are concerned this will be the solution I'll be using in the project I'm currently working on.

Nokia running Android?

Nokia to run on an Android?

So would Microsoft really allow, it's soon to be purchased subsidiary, Nokia, to build and release a mobile phone running Android? It's my belief that they will, and in this article I will layout the reasons why they would be crazy not to.

To fully understand what is at stake here, you need to go back to September 2013 when it was announced that Microsoft where buying Nokia. A big surprise and a big story that might have lead you to believe that it was the whole of Nokia that Microsoft where purchasing, in fact it was only the mobile phone part of the business, with the rest of the company remaining in Finnish hands.

If you look at what Microsoft are getting you see a business with two distinct sections, smart phone and feature phone, and many believe they only took the feature phone part of the business to get the smart phone part they wanted. This is being disingenuous to the feature phones that Nokia produce, because if you look at Nokia's most recent quarterly results, they shipped 55.8 million units, compared to only 8.8 million smart phones, and this is why even today Nokia are still in second place as far as sales of mobile phones are concerned, behind Samsung, but ahead of Apple.

And this gives Microsoft a problem, technically Symbian, the operating system that run's these feature phones has been retired, and until Microsoft came along, the developers at Nokia had been working towards a forked version of Android replacing it. So what has changed?

In reality nothing, Symbian is only being used until a newer operating system is put in place, and the Windows Phone operating system, for the feature phone part of the business, isn't it. We all know that the Lumia range of smart phones is being heavily subsidized by Microsoft, but even they cannot 'give away' the phones for free, especially in the volumes reported in the last quarter.

Microsoft could lower the bar as far as the minimum hardware spec for Windows Phone, but they won't, and they shouldn't, doing so will give a poor impression of the operating system, and ultimately under value it. The fact is, there is a large number of people who want a cheep mobile phone, and Microsoft cannot let those customers go, it would almost be commercial suicide, they need to keep building phones that will be sold for under $30.

Microsoft only have two options, one build an entirely new operating system from scratch, that is designed for low spec hardware, and looking at their history shows that they are not able to do this successfully. Or two, take an existing operating system, that works on low powered hardware, and cut out all of the unnecessary features. And this is the way that it looks as though they are going, forking the Android Open Source Project at version 4.4, stripping out those parts they don't want, and don't need, and then producing a home screen that will probably look more like the Window phone than Android.

From where Microsoft stand, the Android option is one they would want to take if there were others on the table, but they way can look at it is that this might not have to be forever, as an Agile development they could surprise again in a couple of years time with a version of Windows that can scale all the way down to these low powered devices.

It is also worth remembering that Android is already a bit of a cash cow to Microsoft it gets royalties from ever device sold that is worth a total of $2 billion per year.