All posts tagged: google

As smartphone use becomes prevalent in today’s society, they can not only be used for voice and data communication – later models equipped with Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) can also receive messages over a short range from new Bluetooth LE-equipped devices known as Beacons.

As always Google is on the forefront of Beacon technology, and their new beacon platform enables contextual experiences for users through mobile interactions with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. These beacons are simple, low-power devices which send one-way BLE signals that can be read by nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices.

Beacons can be deployed in fixed places such as businesses, museums, and bus stops, and also on movable objects such as vehicles. Deploying BLE beacons in your venue or attaching them to physical assets that you manage is a good way to give users a location-aware experience via their mobile devices, with contextual and timely information for users which is relevant to their local environment.

Google’s beacon platform consists of several components, starting with the beacon hardware. Lightweight and power-efficient BLE beacons transmit Bluetooth beacon frames, such as Eddystone frames, at a defined interval.

The Proximity Beacon API can be used to register any beacon that supports Eddystone, the iBeacon specification or the AltBeacon specification, so you’ve got a wide range of compatible hardware choices.

The next key component is Google’s Eddystone, an open beacon format that can communicate with Android and iOS devices, aimed at improving interoperable BLE beacon-based applications and services. Eddystone is designed with transparency and robustness in mind, building upon lessons learned from working with industry partners in existing deployments, as well as the wider beacon user community, and it’s released under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

The Eddystone protocol specification defines a BLE message format for proximity beacon messages, and it describes several different frame types that may be used individually or in combination to create beacons that can be used for a variety of applications.

Different frame types can typically be interleaved by a single beacon, for example 100 transmissions of an Eddystone UID frame for location identification followed by one Eddystone TLM telemetry frame for a health status check, then a repeat of that cycle.

The final key component of the beacon platform is the Proximity Beacon API, which allows you to administer data associated with the beacons that your application uses. The Proximity Beacon API allows you to manage your beacons, register and update beacons, add “attachments” to beacons via the cloud, and monitor the status and health of beacons by monitoring parameters such as battery level.

To make it easy to learn about the Proximity Beacon API and to get started using it, Google provides proximity beacon sample apps for both iOS and Android mobile platforms.

The Proximity Beacon API allows you to manage data associated with your BLE beacons using a REST interface. The Proximity Beacon API allows you to register beacons to the cloud, with beacon attachments hosted on Google’s servers.

After you register a beacon with the Proximity Beacon API you can associate attachments that are stored in the cloud, which means you can manage and update the information associated with each beacon even after the beacons are deployed.

The Proximity Beacon API, in combination with Eddystone’s telemetry broadcast type, helps you to manage your beacons and ensure that your beacon fleet is behaving as it should. Eddystone-TLM frames allow your beacons to report their status to client devices.

For most beacons, these frames are transmitted at regular intervals throughout the device lifetime. You can use the diagnostics and monitoring tools in the Proximity Beacon API to get health statistics from the beacon network and to identify any erroneous behaviours, such as a beacon with a low battery, allowing you to allocate maintenance where it’s needed with beacons in the field, ensuring that your users have a consistently great experience.

You can use attachments to provide data which is specific to one or more beacons, enabling your apps to react to the user’s location. Since attachments are stored in the cloud, the Proximity Beacon API provides a scalable, low-latency way to manage and update the data associated with your deployed beacons, ensuring that your users always see the latest available data and eliminating the need to manually re-provision beacons.

After attachments have been added to beacons using the Proximity Beacon API, you can retrieve them in your app using the Nearby Messages API.

Using Google’s Nearby API, you can extend the functionality of Eddystone and the Google Beacon Platform, allowing your iOS or Android app to detect nearby beacons and execute their attachments, giving users a rich and interactive proximity-based experience.

Users’ devices can use Bluetooth beacons as a signal to improve other location-based tools, such as the Place Picker, which assists users in selecting nearby locations of interest such as local businesses. With the Nearby API, you can build apps that detect beacons and retrieve messages that you wish to associate with each beacon and process within your app.

Examples could include showing the bus schedule when a user is waiting at a bus stop or providing ticket availability at a theatre kiosk. When you’ve added an attachment to your beacon using the Proximity Beacon API, the Nearby Messages API allows your mobile app to retrieve the attached message or content when the user’s device detects the beacon.

Here at the LX Group we’re ready to partner with you to realise your Beacon requirements, Internet-of-Things ideas and more to bring them to reality. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

During this year’s recent I/O conference, Google announced Brillo, their new operating system targeted at Internet-of-Things applications.

The Brillo OS is a derivative of Android, and be described as a streamlined and cut-down version of Android – targeted towards IoT and smart-home applications on low-power embedded devices with constrained memory and other resources.

According to Google, Brillo is an operating system for the Internet of Things that will connect devices through a communication layer called Weave, which “provides seamless and secure communication between devices, both locally and through the cloud”.

As Brillo is based on the lower levels of Android, you’re likely to be able to choose from a wide variety of hardware platforms and silicon vendors that will be compatible with the Brillo OS. With this all-in-one operating system, you can focus on building your hardware and applications – everything else you need for an end-to-end IoT solution is already built in. Furthermore, Brillo provides a Web-based console for device administration – providing update services, crash reporting and metrics for your devices and making system management inexpensive and accessible.

Brillo provides a kernel, hardware abstraction, connectivity, and security infrastructure within a limited memory footprint, which is ideal for inexpensive and smaller devices. At the time of writing the specific range of supported chipsets and hardware requirements for Brillo are currently unknown, however it has been estimated that it will run on devices with as little as 32 to 64 Mb of RAM – making it a lot more lightweight than regular Android builds.

Furthermore Brillo support is being integrated into the Google mobile platform and Google Play, so support for connectivity to Brillo-equipped devices is built-in to devices (such as smartphones) that run Android, and is easily available for iOS. Android devices will auto-detect Brillo and Weave devices.

It appears likely that Brillo will support wireless communications standards specifically relevant to the IoT market, such as Thread, on supported hardware, along with common Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communications.

For device OEMs, using Brillo means you can build new devices and products quickly and securely, without having to worry about software updates. For other operating systems, you can just add a compatibility library to connect with Brillo devices over Weave.

For app developers, interoperability with Brillo and Weave can extend the reach of your apps to the physical world. You can build one app to control multiple devices in the home and work environments, leveraging Google services such as voice-control actions.

With Brillo, Google is aiming to build an operating system that device manufacturers can put on their devices to ease the process of getting a device online, manage the connectivity and many of the lower-level hardware functions that device manufacturers probably don’t want to deal with.

For end users, Brillo-based and Weave-based IoT applications give users confidence that their connected devices will work with each other, and work with different smartphones and devices. Brillo and Weave promise to make the IoT easy-to-use for end users, since automatic setup, provisioning and easy-to-use sharing is built in.

The second part of Google’s recent announcement concerns Weave – a communications framework for IoT devices that allows different devices to talk to each other. It’s a cross-platform, common language that will let Brillo devices, smartphones and Internet services all talk to each other, addressing the challenge of IoT interoperability.

Weave is cross-platform, and it exposes APIs for developers, making it valuable for OEMs and app developers trying to link their cloud-based services to devices communicating with Weave.

Weave is not a separate protocol, but rather lightweight schema developers can use for standardised and interoperable communications. It provides a common language and vocabulary so that IoT devices can advertise their capabilities to other devices on the network and expose the different functions that they offer, defining certain devices and what they can do.

According to Google, “Weave promises to be “the IoT protocol for everything – from phone to device to cloud”. The idea is to create a standard way for each device in the home or building to explain to the other devices what it’s capable of and what it’s doing right now, so they can all work together as a team.

This functionality that Weave offers appears to be broadly comparable to Apple’s HomeKit system in terms of device discovery, configuration and communication – it’s basically the glue that connects together a bunch of disparate networked devices from different vendors, turning them into a rich system for automation and interoperability.

Furthermore, Google’s Weave program aims to standardise quality and interoperability across different manufacturers through a certification program that device makers must adhere to for their devices to be “Weave Compatible”.

As part of this program, Weave provides a core set of schemas that will enable apps and devices to seamlessly interact with each other. “We want to connect devices in a seamless and intuitive way, and make them work better for users”, according to Sundar Pichai’s announcement at Google I/O.

Brillo and Weave represent a key public development in Google’s offerings in the IoT and home automation market, which has been fairly quiet following last year’s acquisition of Nest Labs. The Nest thermostat and future devices in the Nest ecosystem will also use Weave, so devices from other manufacturers can easily and securely interoperate with these Nest products.

This new development from Google is highly-anticipated by all of us in the Internet-of-Things development community, and the team at LX is ready when you are. Our team of solutions architects, engineers and specialists is ready to partner with you for your success in the IoT marketplace. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Wearable computing – the use of personal computers, displays and sensors worn on one’s person – gives us the potential for advancement in human-computer interaction compared to traditional personal computing – for example the ability to have constant access and interaction with a computer – and the Internet, whilst going about our daily activities.

This could be considered the ultimate in multitasking – the use of your computing device at any time without interrupting your other activities. For example, the ability to read an email or retrieve required information while walking or working on other tasks. Wearable computing potentially offers much greater consistency in human-computer interaction – constant access to the computer, constant connectivity, without a computing device being used in an on-and-off fashion in between other activities.

Once contemporary example of this is the new Google Glass, which represents an advanced, sleek, beautifully designed head-mounted wearable computer with a display suitable for augmented-reality applications – or just as an “ordinary” personal head-mounted display. Even before its public release, the frenzy surrounding Google Glass amongst technology enthusiasts demonstrates the potential level of market demand for wearable computers.

However, with a price of at least US$1500 price tag of Google Glass, (at least for its “Explorer Edition” beta version) this leads many to consider what potential might exist for the deployment of wearable computing and wearable sensor-network technologies – however at a lower cost.

One example is the category known as “Smart Watches” such as the Sony SmartWatch and Pebble Technology’s “Pebble” e-Paper watch – which both offer constant, on-the-go access to information from the Internet – and thus become a member of the Internet of Things – at a glance of the wrist. Text messages and email notifications are amongst the most simple, common examples of data that can be pushed to a smart watch, but the display of information from a multitude of other Internet-connected data streams is possible.

With the growing popularity and increasing hardware capabilities of smart phones, it is increasingly taken for granted that a smart phone carried on one’s person can act as a gateway between the Internet (connected via the cellular networks) and other smaller, lower-power wearable computer or sensor devices worn on the body and connected back to the smartphone via standard data links such as WiFi or Bluetooth. In using the smart phone as an Internet connection, the size, price and weight of the wearable device can be significantly reduced – which also leads to a considerable reduction in cost.

Furthermore, apart from providing mobile Internet connectivity, the smart phone can also provide a large display and an amount of storage capacity – which can be harnessed for the logging, visualisation and display of data collected from a network-connected sensor node wearable on one’s body, or a whole network of such sensor nodes distributed around different personal electronic devices carried on the person and different types of physical sensors around the body.

The increasing penetration of smart phones in the market and the increasing availability and decreasing cost of wireless radio-networked microcontroller system-on-chips, MEMS
sensors and energy efficient short-range wireless connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0 are among some of the factors responsible for increasing the capabilities of,
and decreasing the cost of, wearable computing and wearable Internet-of-Things and sensor platforms.

Speed and position loggers, GPS data loggers and smart pedometers intended for logging and monitoring athletic performance, such as the Internet-connected, GPS-enabled,
Nike+ system; along with biomedical instrumentation and sensor devices such as Polar’s Bluetooth-connected heart rate sensors are other prominent examples of wearable Internet-of-Things devices which are attracting increasing consumer interest on the market today.

Combined with display devices such as smart watches, smart phones and head-mounted displays such as Google Glass. these kinds of wearable sensors create a complete wearable machine-to-machine Internet-of-Things network that can be self-contained on one’s person. Which leads us to the next level of possibilities – what do your customers want a device to do? And how can it be accomplished? And do you have the resources or expertise to design, test and bring such a system to the market?

It isn’t easy – there’s a lot of technology to work with – however it can be done with the right technology parter. Here at the LX Group we have the experience and team to make things happen. With our experience with sensors, embedded and wireless hardware/software design, and ability to transfer ideas from the whiteboard to the white box – we can partner with you for your success.

We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you – within your required time-frame and your budget. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Recently Google announced their new Cloud Platform services, which allow almost anyone to build applications, websites, store and analyse data using Google’s infrastructure. This is an exciting development for those looking to implement a scalable Internet-of-things system at a minimal cost – so we’ll take an overview of the system as it stands today.

Almost everyone is aware of the researched information, computing power and infrastructure available for Google’s myriad of services, and now it’s possible to harness some of this for your own needs. With the introduction of their “Cloud Platform”, you can harness this power that Google has used internally for years to provide Google’s familiar high-speed, high-scale big-data products and services such as Search, YouTube, Google Docs and GMail and make it available as cloud computing services for use with your own Internet-of-Things projects.

Large-scale, high-speed, distributed “cloud” storage and computation with large amounts of data is at the heart of everything that makes Google what it is, so it’s clear that they have substantial opportunities to offer external cloud-computing customers.

Whilst Google is not the first major player in the cloud computing market, their substantial infrastructure and “Big Data” experience represents a significant source of potential competition with other established cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services. The capability to use Google’s data centre infrastructure for cloud storage and computation, their data tools such as BigQuery to process very large scale data sets – and integration with Google’s data, services and apps are increasingly attractive.

The Google Cloud Platform is made up of a couple of different core components – Compute and Storage being two of the most important. The Compute component includes the Google Compute Engine, which is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform designed to run any application on top of Google’s infrastructure – which offers fast networking, scalable processing and storage, and the App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications. The Storage component includes Google Cloud Storage and the BigQuery large-scale query system.

As with most cloud computing platforms, end users access cloud-based applications and infrastructure through a relatively lightweight local computer – via a web browser, lightweight desktop software, or a mobile device application – with the data and most of the software are stored on remote servers in the cloud. Therefore, the hardware requirements for the user to leverage the power of applications and data on Google Cloud Platform-hosted applications and services are almost trivial.

Many components of the Google Cloud Platform support open standards and protocols such as REST-based APIs. The Google Compute Engine is built atop a JSON RESTful API which
can be accessed via numerous different libraries, command-line utilities and GUI front-end tools. Google’s BigQuery, a cloud-based fully managed interactive query service specifically designed for work with massive datasets, is operated via an SQL-like query language.

Google Cloud Storage complements the Compute component of the Google Cloud Platform and serves to glue together all Google Cloud Services. Google Cloud Storage is a HTTP service that serves data directly over HTTP with high performance and resumable transfers of objects up to the terabyte scale. It offers support for two different APIs – one that is compatible with the XML standard used by competing providers such as Amazon Web Services and another API built around JSON and OAuth, consistent with the Google Compute Engine’s API.

The Google App Engine is a “Platform-as-a-Service” cloud computing platform for the development and hosting of web applications in Google’s managed data centres. Applications are sand-boxed and distributed across multiple servers. One of the major benefits of using the Google App Engine is that it can offer automatic scaling for web applications – that is, automatically allocating more resources for the web application to handle the increased demand as the number of requests for a particular application increases.

All that sounds quite useful, however why would your organisation use the Google Cloud Platform? Whilst it requires an initial investment to import your data (especially on a large scale) into the cloud, this is offset by the substantial advantages offered by the platform. By offering fully managed services that remove the requirement for upfront capacity planning, provisioning, constant monitoring and planning software updates. This can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of large-scale data handling solutions.

Furthermore there’s one thing in particular that sets the Google Cloud Platform apart – the network that connects the company’s data centres so data can be processed and delivered where it is needed in milliseconds. Google has a private distributed backbone between all its data centres – so if you’re moving data around within Google’s cloud, even within geographically diverse data centres (although this is essentially invisible to the user) your data travels over Google’s backbone, and not over the Internet – providing substantially improved performance.

Whilst the Compute and Storage components of the Google Cloud Platform are separate offerings, the performance of Google’s networks make it appear as though they integrated seamlessly, thus allowing integration of Google’s cloud storage and computation with no obvious slowdown.

At the LX Group we have a wealth of experience and expertise in the IoT field, and can develop new or modify existing hardware and software to integrate your system with the Google Cloud Platform. As always, our goal is to find and implement the best system for our customers, and this is where the LX Group can partner with you for your success.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.