I'm working on a project to track delivery trucks leaving and returning to the office.
While I know RFID would work, we're also looking at BlueTooth with mobile apps. Ideally, once a driver installs the app, we register a unique ID for the device, and a BT reader identifies when phones/deliveries leave and enter range without any user interaction.
From the Android 6.0 release notes, it looks like the MAC address is hidden from apps and BT broadcasting. https://developer.android.com/about/versions/marshmallow/android-6.0-changes#behavior-hardware-id
User management of app installs and enabling BT aside, is this feasible?
Can someone point me in the right direction to confirm what identifiers are available?
When I understand you correctly you actually do not want to track where a phone is but want to know if a person/truck/phone passes a kind of checkpoint or gate?
For newer smart phones you cannot rely on the visible MAC. Bluetooth classic is usually not visible and the BLE MAC is randomized as long as the device is not paired and bonded.
Indeed as PaulW11 stated, the simple way would be to implement an app which does BLE advertising with short advertising interval. Inside this advertisment you can put some custom data. This will be visible to everyone. This ID can be some random number, a number assigned by you or whatever.
At the gate you would implement a BLE scanner grabbing all advertisments near to it.
This should be easy to implement.
I would also like to mention the drawbacks here: If someone passes the gate you may miss him. BLE with Android is always tricky and you might have the situation that the bluetooth subsystem on a phone may have stopped working or so.
One the other hand if someone comes accidently near to your gate, you will think he left or returned. Near can be something around 50 m or so with good conditions or only 10 in other cases.
And even worse: If someone stays 'nearly' in the range of the gate you will see im sporadically. This may confuse your come and go logic if he is visible every 3 minutes or so...
Related
I am trying to build a system with a raspberry pi that allows clients access into a building depending on their membership status. Right now, it uses QR codes, but I want to know if it is possible to add a feature where it uses some technology like NFC or RFID or Bluetooth to detect their phone or RFID card from at least a foot away and confirm they have a membership.
Someone told me I could use RFID, but I am only aware of that being used in short-distance applications, like a card on a hotel door. I am not sure about Bluetooth either, because the phone would have to connect to the pi first, right? Maybe there is something I don't know about. So please offer any suggestions. Thanks
I think bluetooth does good work for tracking user. Since it's the best to handle large distances than NFC and RFID these two technologies are used for low range scenarios, check this link.
In addition, you can check distance(using Proximity and RSSI) and membership status as well. but you need to know how to handle bluetooth connectivity with raspberry pi check this link. as well create an app on that mobile phone to use Bluetooth (depending which OS you're using for Android, iOS).
Regards,
I am aware of MOTO G first version has bluetooth issues.
Background:
My app scans for beacons in the vicinity. The app works great on all Android phones except Motorola Moto G, 1st version with Android 5.1. On this phone, it finds all the beacons except one and the scanning is pretty fast as well. However, with this specific beacon (skybeacon), it only detects first packet and after that it takes forever to find this specific beacon while finding others. A simple conclusion is this specification beacon has issues, which might be true. However, it becomes more interesting from here.
To understand this more, I downloaded other BLE scanners from play store. When I used "BLE Analyzer" from bluevoid, it captures this beacon perfectly. I can see RSSI changing as I move the beacon and it is pretty fast. Once I push BLE Analyzer to background and check our app, surprisingly our app works now. I repeated this, 20/20 times my app captures this specific beacon as long as BLE Analyzer is pushed into background (by pressing home button). If I restart or uninstall or wont open BLE Analyzer at all, my app wont capture this specific beacon.
Possible explanations:
For good or bad this specific beacon is advertising in one channel and the default scanning on this specific phone is having a mismatch. If this is in the right direction, then how to change default scanning channels through app?
This phone might have an integrated chip for wifi, bluetooth and 3G, which might be true. When I disable wifi, I do not see any changes in behavior. When I disable data (3G, not 4G on this), it some times (2 out of 10) start capturing the skybeacon. Again 2 out of 10 times is not a repeatable solution.
Any thoughts?
I have been tirelessly trying to decide on the best option for getting phones to talk to each other that are nearby, I need something with the ability to broadcast and receive. It is kind of like NFC with more range, I'd like to be able to send messages 30 to 50 feet away using nothing but a phone.
Bluetooth cannot broadcast and receive to more than 8 devices still, there might be changes to that in Apple's new OS but Android and Windows are still going to be lacking, so Bluetooth is out of the question.
I was thinking of maybe trying to use Wifi, but I have not found very many good resources on how I would go about doing that without making a virtual server, I'd much rather not go that route if possible.
I could even use GPS although with the power consumption of GPS and having to be an always on feature I am not certain I would like to use GPS if I can avoid it.
The one I really want to use, uses sounds made and received by the phone. I have been playing around with a listener that converts different frequencies to 1's and 0's, but with all things sound, it gets increasingly hard if lots of people are talking, or there is music playing, or if there are objects in the way, the Doppler effect and more. Is there someone out there who has already made a filter for this? Some other problems would be, what is the range sound travels at 20khz through air? I can also not find much good documentation anywhere for devices whose speakers can make sound above 20khz but it seems most can, the problem then is what microphones can hear sounds above 20khz.
I would really love to use sound as I think it is interesting, and it would make the app work without any internet or phone connection which I think is pretty cool. This is a side-project I am working on, and really don't want to spend hours down a path that will ultimately fail.
If anyone thinks it's possible to do this with sound over other devices, I'd much rather like to do it that way, I think there is a lot of interesting things you could do with that technology, I just don't know how viable it is over using wifi or bluetooth or even GPS.
At ios you have no controll to low level "things". You can read the current connected wlan ssid, but not all wlan ids which the operation system can see.
I would first try the location services approach. Settig to 1000m acuarcy will usually disable GPS, but enable cell-tower an wlan locationing.
Especially the wlan locationing gives an indirect hint that the persons are near the same wlan
I am using a SPP Bluetooth module to send data between my Android phone app and the module. I stumbled upon an interesting thing today.
I pair to my module by entering a passkey
I can normally send data back and forth between my app and the module
From within my app I disconnect from the module and close my app.
On the module I change its passkey to a new value.
I reopen my app and can still exchange data. I do not need to go through pairing again. All security information exchanged by my phone and module when I first paired them (using the old passkey) seem to still be valid even after changing the PIN on the module.
I then close my app and unpair the device from Bluetooth settings.
After that I pair the two devices to make sure Passkey change was in fact accepted and surely enough it was. I can now only pair with the new PIN.
My surprise is that in point 5 above everything still worked even without updating the PIN also on my mobile phone. I plan on getting around this by calling removeBond() using reflection after I send the module a command to change PIN since this is enough for my particular use case. But if the PIN change could be triggered by something else then my phone this would not work.
My question is if this is normal. Bluetooth specs are quite long so I was hoping someone else knows this. I would imagine that after changing the passkey for a Bluetooth device all devices already paired with it will have to go through the pairing process again, this time with the new passkey. But steps above indicate this is not the case. Is this a bug on my Bluetooth module (Bluegiga WT12) or is this expected behaviour? Has Anyone encountered this before?
Thank you.
Cheers!
So, Bluetooth specs are more friendly than I thought. I found my answer in this paragraph:
The Bluetooth PIN is used to authenticate two Bluetooth devices (that have not
previously exchanged link keys) to each other and create a trusted relationship
between them. The PIN is used in the pairing procedure (see Section 11.2 on
page 241) to generate the initial link key that is used for further authentication.
So passkey is not like a password in a router. It is just a sequence which both devices need to know when connecting so that one authenticates the other. Once they are sure they can trust each other they exchange link keys and those are used for future communication. Passkeys/PINs are then irrelevant.
I hope I understand this right.
Terribly sorry for posting too soon.
Cheers!
I recently downloaded a barcode reading application for my phone, an LG KU990i (AKA the Viewty) However, there's a problem that renders the application nearly useless: the Viewty has 2 cameras -- the main one, and a secondary camera located on the face of the unit -- and it is the secondary camera that is unfortunately set as the phone's default video capture device. As you can't point the secondary at anything and see what it's pointing at at the same time, it makes it a bit difficult to snap a barcode!
According to the JSR-135 spec, it is possible to specify a video capture device other than the default... if you know the device name. This does not appear to be documented anywhere on LG's Web site, nor does the JSR-135 spec describe any way of enumerating the devices on a phone... or is there? Failing that, are there any naming conventions for video devices commonly in use that LG might be using?
I've logged a ticket with LG, but as it's an old device, I don't imagine them breaking their backs in getting back to me... I should also point out that this is purely for my own curiosity so no-one here should feel obliged to break their backs either!
As far as I know there is no way to get list of all available catpure:// urls.
All urls I know:
capture://image,
capture://video
capture://devcam0
capture://devcam1
Source:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/bc00e4ce-7df3-4527-962c-d39843a808d0/MIDP_Mobile_Media_API_Support_In_Nokia_Devices_v1_0_en.pdf.html
LG responded to my support ticket. Apparently, it's not possible to access the primary camera on the Viewty from Java, making it pretty much useless for barcode scanning. Answer reproduced here for search engines.
You support ticket has been answered. Please visit the LG Mobile Developer Network and login to check the answer at [My Page > My Tickets].
KU990i default video capture device is the secondary camera
Answer :
Hi,
KU990i have to Two camera module
differently.
Main camera using Joran chipset and
sub(front camera) using Qualcomm
chipset.
Joran chip doesn’t supported JSR135.
Therefore, we couldn’t supported to
the JSR135 using for main camera.
(it is H/W limitation)
It was inform to operator already and
we remember operator was confirm it.
So that, we only supported sub camera
for JSR135.
BR,