Hi - I have a customer interested in using beacons as a means of tracking visitors/staff within a temporary premises. I’m thinking either an app or sticker on existing ID cards. Does anyone know of an operational use case with some form of cloud management interface to track individuals/visitors to the environment? The main function is to track individuals whereabouts for health and safety reasons, specifically whether they are onsite or not.
Cheers,
Nick
Can’t recall any operational use case like that off the top of my head, but I’ve seen numerous proof of concepts of something like that. E.g., people using a Raspberry Pi in a conference room to detect employees (with stickers on their badge) coming and going.
Thanks Piotr, those sound like the types of use cases I’m after. Do you know of anyone who has developed beyond concept? Would a dedicated IOT device such as http://openblocks.plathome.co.jp/products/obs_iot/ be a better option than the Raspberry Pi?
Any programmable device with Bluetooth 4.0 (aka BLE) and some other communication channel (WiFi, Ethernet, 3G, etc.) to upload the detection results to your backend should do. Rasp Pi 3 comes with BLE and WiFi and is very cost-efficient. Those OpenBlocks also look nice, especially the 3G/LTE versions. Just make sure they run some kind of Linux or are otherwise programmable, so that you can write an app for them that will detect beacons/stickers and send the comings and goings to a server.
If you don’t want to write your own backend for that, I’ve heard Firebase’s Real-Time Database works really nice for use cases like this: