My professor recently approved our research paper which will also be used in our final year thesis. Basically our main purpose is to create a system for location tracking and attendance automation for students and staffs. We would like to use the power of bluetooth low energy modules for this project.
I have actually done quite few research about this but I am having trouble which keywords to use in order for me to filter the right answers for my question. So instead, I'll just put all my questions here.
I provided an image to further understand the concept I am talking about.
Basically, the broadcaster/advertisement mode modules are for students and staffs. While the observer mode modules are initially installed in every rooms or spaces in our building/campus.
Broadcast and Observer mode
I would like to clarify first that the location tracking is only basic, it only detects which rooms are the students and staffs located.
Here are my questions:
What is the maximum advertisement/broadcaster module can the observer module detects at the same time?
Our target is about 50 students per room, 300 students in cafeteria, will the observer module have a large amount of latency upon scanning advertisement packets?
Do we have to use different module for observer mode, or will the same module for broadcaster mode be just fine?
Since this is supposedly embedded to school IDs, we would like to use a coin cell battery, how long will it last?
According to my research, BLE range is about 100 meters, but we will be using coin cell battery, is it really possible to achieve 100m for broadcasting and observing? If it is, can we perhaps decrease it by programming?
My apologies for too much question, as this is actually our first time doing applied hardware stuffs due to pandemic. Most of our laboratories are basically tinkercad base. Face-to-face classes are allowed for only medical students for now.
A few answers:
BLE scanners can detect hundreds of distinct broadcasters at the same time. There is no hard limit, but the more broadcasters the longer it will take the scanners to detect each broadcaster.
Most BLE modules support both peripheral mode (broadcaster) and central mode (scanner) simultaneously.
Scanning 50 broadcasters in a single room will easily detect 90% of packets, so if the advertiser is going at 1 Hz it will usually take one second to detect, but sometimes 2-3 seconds of packets are missed.
The indoor range is closer to 40 meters with no walls obstructing the signal. Outdoors with clear line of sight the range is higher. Walls often block signals almost entirely, depending on materials.
A CR2032 coin cell can power a BLE broadcast at 1 Hz and max power for about 30 days.
Creating an embedded solution is cool and valid but just remember that broadcasters already exists as each and every student carries a smartphone with BLE embedded into it and your observer can be any BLE capable device from smartphone through PC with BLE dongle all the way to Arduino and alike.
Your broadcasters (or BLE peripherals as they should be called) will need an Android / iOS app and you will have to deal with working in the background without the operating system stopping your app.
Your observer (or Central in BLE language) can be any stationary PC if such exists in the class which can make development and deployment a lot easier.
Related
I'm reading so much propaganda about BLE beacons (Kontakt.io, in my case) being accurate to the centimetre, readable at 70 metres etc etc, but my experience has been nothing like that.
I have 3 beacons. If they're in the next room over (door open, around 6 or 7 metres), it'll detect maybe one or two, after around 20 seconds. Even then I often need to restart my app over and over to detect it.
Move them to the same room, and they're pretty much okay. Everything's default, scanMode is 'LOW_LATENCY', scanPeriod is 'RANGING', I'm not sure what else I can do.
Do these results sound way off, or are they just not that good?
A few tips about Bluetooth beacons in general, not specifically Kontakt beacons:
When you need to restart your app to detect beacons, that clearly means it is something on the phone, not the beacons themselves that are the issue. That issue may be the app, the SDK, the Bluetooth stack on the phone, or the phone's bluetooth hardware. Try an off the shelf detector app like BeaconLocate for iOS or Android and also test with a different phone.
The range of a beacon is dependent on its output transmitter power, typically measured at 1 meter. This output power is adjustable on many hardware beacons and is often set lower than the maximum to save battery on battery-powered models. For best detection results, set the output power to the maximum that configuration allows. An output power at one meter should be at least -59 dBm for best results. Less negative numbers mean more power. Because some phone models have poor sensitivity and measure RSSI inaccurately, you may want to measure with different models. In general iOS models are more predictable receivers.
The range of a beacon between rooms varies greatly depending on materials in walls, furnishings, and local geometry. A beacon with an output power of -59 dBm at one meter can be reliably detected by a phone with a sensitive receiver at 40 meters away, but only with clear line of sight conditions (typically outdoors). Intermittently, I have seen such beacons be detected outdoors at over 100 meters away. Intermittently means that 99% of packets are lost, a small percentage are successfully received.
Always be skeptical of marketing claims from companies trying to sell you something. The above points should tell you what is achievable from an independent engineering perspective.
In my project i'll use modbus protocol for serial communication. There are more than 320 slaves which seperated equally in 2 groups(see image). Every 16 slaves are powered from the same supply and isolated from others galvanically(Master'll be isolated from all the slaves).
My first question is if there is a problem in this design?
Secondly I want to synchronise all the slaves via 10ms period pulses that are derived from master microcontroller. How can i achieve a robust synchronisation(what type of bus, single or differential signal, where to isolate)?
Here is an alternative one:
see picture
Many things can go wrong here. For starters, it will take a looooooong time for you to poll each and every one of your slaves. And your isolators will easily introduce delays beyond 2us to your sync signal.
Can you briefly tell us what are you trying to do specifically, eg. synchronized motion control? There are other alternatives used in industrial solutions.
Most of the synchronized motion control used in industrial systems are used to replace mechanical cams and eccentric gears, and thus usually called "electronic camming" in this field. Here's a list of techniques I had come across in my last job
A PLC which outputs multiple pulse trains, each commands an individual servo/stepper motor driver. The PLC will have to store all the motion profiles and do all the interpolations, so relatively simple drives can be used. But each actuator will need it's own pulse train lines, and there's just too much in your system.
Motor drives stores motion profile & does interpolation, and the motion is advanced/reversed by an external pulse train. This is a technique used in Delta Automation ASDA and Schneider Electric Lexium 23 model industrial servo drives. The motion profiles are either burnt into the drive's EEPROM beforehand, or written in through MODBUS. This is very close to what you are trying to do, but the difference here is the external sync pulse train is on a separate wire.
Real Time Ethernet. The target positions are periodically written to each drives at a specific interval. This can be done very rapidly at 100Mbps. As for the latency that occurs when writing to different drives, there is a built in mechanism that measures the latency of each drives, and this is then compensated accordingly later. Cool eh? The one that I had saw, but never really used is EtherCAT by Beckhoff.
I worked mostly with method 2 in the past, and from those experience you needs might not need to be so stringent. Here are my recommendations.
It will be perfectly fine if your sync signal is delayed a little if your mechanism has no risk of collision if the timing is off by a little. But lost pulses cannot be tolerated as one of the actuators will be out of phase. Don't scrimp on your sync & communication cable quality, shielded twisted pair if possble, and connect them properly.
If the communication line is not too long, isolators are not needed. I had worked with lines up to 8 meters without the need for isolators or repeaters. Instead I am more worried about the number of spur (branch) connection on your RS485 bus. If possible, connect everything to your 2 main buses directly.
If this is a production system, there might be a problem. When the system is running in sync motion mode, there is no way to monitor the actuators as the communication lines are now occupied. This will not be acceptable on a real world application, but if this is just a proof of concept design, go for it.
I have really work on a final year project in 4th year computer science. I need to calculate the blood pressure level of a human in a real time and alert to him.
Do we have any sensors for Ardino or Resbrry PI boards.
I have search on enter link description here but I have seen lots of sensors for heart rate but non of them for blood pressure.
Do you think is there any sensors available to get the blood pressures from ardino or rasberry PI ?
You've got a BIG project ahead of you. Automated blood pressure monitors are expensive medical devices, but I'll get you started.
Take a look at this link and think about the physical functions you must accomplish.
http://homepage.smc.edu/wissmann_paul/anatomy1/1bloodpressure.html
First, you have to build a pneumatic control system to inflate a blood pressure cuff and then slowly deflate it.
Second, you have to build an acoustic monitor to listen for the heartbeat below the cuff and a digital signal processing algorithm to detect the heartbeat.
For the first project look online for small pneumatic pumps and solenoid control valves. You will control these with the Arduino and a power transistor to switch the power on and off.
For the second project you will need to build a microphone and amplify that. You can find plenty of examples of microphones on the Arduino forum. The trick part will be designing the DSP filter to identify heartbeats and then count them. See Simon Monk's book, "Beyond Sketches" for an intro to DSP on the Arduino.
Get started and post some more and I'll check back to see if I can help on specific problems as you go forward.
I'm making an application for a running competition on a fixed track. I'm investigating what systems could be used and tough of using a stick containing a GPS/DGPS module and a Zigbee enabled chip to communicate the location to a server.
I've researched the subject (on the internet) but I was wondering if anyone has some practical advice/experience with using a Zigbee mesh/star topology in a dynamic environment wich could apply to this use case. I'm also very interested in using a mesh topology where the data is transmitted (hopping) trough the different Zigbee modules to the server.
Runners are holding a stick; run around the track and than pass the stick on to the next team member.
I am not particularly clear about your goal. But I'd like to say a few things.
First, using GPS/DGPS to measure which team reaches the finish line is inaccurate. Raw GPS data is horrible in accuracy (varying in 1 - 10 meters, well, around that), also the sampling rate of a GPS module is low (say once a second?) How do you determine exactly which team reaches the finish line first?
Second, to use a mobile ZigBee chip to communicate in real-time is hard. I assume your stick has a ZigBee end device. When it is moving (which in your case is pretty fast), it must dynamically find and associate with new parent routers, which takes time and depending on the wireless environment, it might involve several retries. So you will imagine a packet is only successfully delivered to the other end after 100ms or even a second. This might not be a problem if your stick records the exact time when a team reaches the finish line. Since you have a GPS module in the stick so there is no problem in getting very accurate time.
I have a friend who is working on a project where they need to deploy a large number of devices over the midwest. For simplicity let's say these are temperature gauges - they read the current temperature and transmit that information to a server. The server would just need to know what device is reporting what temperature (412X|10c).
These devices will be in forests, near highways, in cities and swamps. All other technology is prototyped and working (ability to read the temperature, the hardware for the device) the open question they have right now is 'what is the cheapest way we can send this information to the primary server'?
I think they'll need to go with a wireless carrier (verizon/sprint/at&t) and use something similar to mobile broadband. Is there really any other option?
You could do it with ham radio and something like APRS, assuming they don't care about encryption and don't have a pecuniary interest in the project.
You wouldn't need full mobile broadband, as your data would fit in a text message. You can get cellular shields for arduino that would probably fit your needs.