Catherine Jones

Stories By Catherine Jones

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  Mobile

  Mobile By Catherine Jones

  Pozyx, Is this the end of iBeacons?

  The GPS in a modern smart phone is great outdoors for finding your way to the train station, a new coffee shop or a friends flat for a party. GPS is not so good indoors, the signals from the satellites get blocked and bounce off walls and can't always penetrate through ceilings, making the experience unreliable at best and mostly completely unusable. iBeacons which are really just Apple's fancy marketing name for Bluetooth Low energy beacons have tried to solve that problem. iBeacons have been deployed in galleries,museums and shops to alert visitors and shoppers to new exhibits, offers and items on sale. They can work but still aren't perfect. The bluetooth signal bounces off glass and metal display cases and is absorbed by water. The human body is over 50% water so there can be a big difference between how well the iBeacons work when tested in an empty store and how they actually work on a busy saturday when the store is fully of people moving around. The team at Pozyx are hoping to solve many of the problems associated with using GPS, iBeacon and wi-fi positioning technology indoors. Pozyx uses UltraWide-Band (UWB) technology. UWB uses low energy pulses over a wide frequency band to get around the interference problems of using conventional radio using a very narrow frequency signal that is transmitted continously. UWB isn't a new technology but previous systems have been expensive and aimed at large industrial uses in factories and by utility companies. Pozyx comes out of the research of Samuel Van der Velde at the University of Ghent. Rather than develop an end user product the Pozyx team have instead opted to develop an add on shield that can be added onto the popular Arduino microcontroller development board. Developing a low cost board will let researchers test and improve algorithms and hypotheses which until now there hasn't been a cheap and easy development board available with which to do this. Using the Arduino platform opens up UWB to hobbyists who are already familiar with Arduino and have been developing projects but have been frustrated with the accuracy of existing solutions. To work fully the Pozyx device also requires four anchor boards that need to be installed in the space, these take the place of the satellites used in GPS positioning system. With these anchor boards installed the Pozyx team claim to be able to obtain positional accuracy of around 10cm. A big improvement on wifi and bluetooth at around 1 - 5M and up to 10m for GPS. In addition to the positioning technology, the Pozyx boards also include accelerometers, magnetometer, gyroscope and pressure sensor, so you can fully understand what the Pozyx board is doing at any time Pozyx might not be a direct replacement for iBeacons just yet but there are potentially many more applications that Pozyx can be used for, from robots and drones to tracking pets and people. That is part of the reason that Pozyx are currently running a Kickstarter to make the boards available so that people can experiment with the devices and have access to the previously unobtainable technology and see what can be done with it and what interesting and novel ideas they can come up with. The Kickstarter runs until July 1st and has been fully funded, the team are now offering stretch goals. The boards are estimated to be delivered in October this year so hopefully wont be too long until Pozyx get in the hands of people who can dream up ideas and start to test the boards. Pozyx might not replace iBeacons any time soon but it may quickly lead to much improved navigation of robots and drones in your house or workspace,factory or hospital or by getting the boards into peoples hands who might be interested in solving other problems come up with ideas for products and devices that haven't at all been possible using existing positioning technologies.

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  News

  News By Catherine Jones

  Growing Up Geek

  Pens were always a problem in our house when I was young. Not for me but for my parents, they could never find one when they needed to write a shopping list or take a telephone message. This was mainly because I would take them apart. I was fascinated by the retractable pens with the little button at the top. It was the latching mechanism that would you could click once to extend and then again to retract. I would swap springs around and mess around with the other parts of the mechanism to see if they were compatible with other pens and what affect it would have. From pens this led on to taking apart radios and televisions. We had a Science and engineering talk at school once including a demonstration of what happens when you put a strong magnet close to a television. This was the old type of CRT television using electron beams to create the picture. The demonstration showed the picture is made up of 3 beams for the red,green and blue elements of the picture and a strong warning not to try it at home. That evening straight home from school, it took about 5 minutes to mess the beams up with a speaker magnet and about three hours to put them right again. My first computer was an Acorn Electron, baby brother to the more famous BBC Micro and great,great uncle of the Raspberry Pi. After watching a film where one of the characters took chips out of his computer to see if it would still work, that became my next challenge. Followed later on that week by a trip to a computer repair shop, to have my damage put right. I am still comfortable breaking things if it means I learn how they work. My parents took me to some really cool places when I was growing up, The Science Museum in London, Joddrell Bank Radio Telescope near Manchester, and Goonhilly Downs at one time main site for B.Ts satellite earth station when we were on holiday in Cornwall. They even took me to Birmingham airport for a ride on the Maglev train when we were nearby. Probably the best thing they did was take me on a plane trip to see Halleys comet when its orbit last brought it close to the Earth. Closer to home we would go to Kelham Island Museum to see the massive River Don Steam engine in action and learn about the steel and silver making in Sheffield. In my teens I moved on to taking apart bikes and cars and then back into computers, I built, repaired and upgraded my own P.Cs for a long time until recently finally I succumbed to the shiny Apple laptop. Unlike many geeks I've never really been into computer games or comics, they are great fun,just never been a passion, you just can't take them apart. I've had a wide variety of jobs in Engineering and technology. Mostly around taking things apart and working out why they aren't working as they are supposed to and hopefully putting them back together fully working unlike the pens of my childhood. Looking back its amazing to see how the skills learned in one job can be transferred to entirely different technologies. Its also amazing to look back at how much technology has progressed since I was a child. Computers have become many times more powerful and part of our lives than I could have imagined when first playing around with that first Acorn Electron. Mobile phones once heavy, bulky and only for the rich have become the norm, merging with our computers to create mobile devices many of us can't image being without. As Augmented reality and Virtual reality devices look to be moving from a niche into the main stream there will be many more advances and applications both playful and serious developed for them. I do much more making things these days and love talking and writing about technology. Recently I've started to explore my creative side more. I was never any good at drawing or painting as a child, but am now learning what you can do with computer code, an Arduino and plenty of LEDs.

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