Technology News

An engineer sent me a screenshot: his Bluetooth module pulled 9 milliamps in sleep, and the datasheet promised 1.8. He'd designed the battery around the 1.8. The chip wasn't broken.…

A buyer forwarded me a datasheet: "200 meters." He'd stuck the BLE Tag on a pallet, and it dropped off the gateway at nineteen meters past the door. The number…

A plain advertising beacon only answers one question: "where is this tag?" Add a sensor — temperature, humidity, acceleration, light — and the same hardware becomes a distributed measurement node…

A warehouse supervisor showed me a graph that looked like a heartbeat on espresso. The RSSI from one Beacon was swinging forty decibels every few seconds, and his location engine…

A customer sent me two boards with the same Bluetooth module on each, one with a chip antenna and one with a whip on the edge. The whip beat it…

Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) positioning is one of the most accurate approaches in BLE-based indoor localization—but it places the most demanding requirement on the system: all receiving beacons (anchors)…

A maintenance shop told us they burned about forty hours a month looking for tools. Nothing was stolen. Everything was just somewhere else. Here's what we put on them, what…

A facilities manager asked me for one number. I gave him a dollar forty per square meter. Then he asked what was in it, and the meeting got long. The…

It paired fine on the bench. In the field it dropped every couple of hours, never at a useful moment, never reproducibly. We spent three weeks on it. Here are…

"Which one should we use?" The honest answer is "it depends," which is useless when you're the one signing the purchase order. So we stopped answering and started measuring: same…