Internet of Things

iBeacon is a technology by Apple enabling location awareness possibilities for apps. Leveraging Bluetooth Low Energy, a device with iBeacon technology can be used to establish a region around an object. This allows an iOS device to determine when it has entered or left the region.

Beacon transmitters could be placed basically anywhere, but it is quite logical to place them inside luminaires. Luminaires already cover the whole area people move around in and they already have their power installed in the building. Luminaires also tend to light up some kind of object and whether the object is a piece of art in an art gallery or a car at a car retailer, a beacon receiver can trigger an app to display information about the object in question.

Casambi has integrated iBeacon technology in all Casambi’s products, therefore any Casambi node can work as an iBeacon sender and, no additional investment needs to be done for these services.

Casambi, as a technology enabler, has created a firmware extension interface to make it possible to send sensor values and diagnostics through the Casambi network to the cloud and back.

Sensor values could be anything measurable like illuminance, humidity, carbon dioxide, wind, colour temperature, how many people have passed a certain place, a specific status or an amount of time that has passed after an occurrence. Sensor values can be read from the app. They refresh based on a chosen interval or they can be refreshed on demand. The gathered data can be used for any kinds of analysis and business purposes.

The extension interface allows bidirectional communication between CBM-002 running the Casambi firmware and a secondary MCU of a Casambi-partner’s choice. In this way a partner can provide customer specific functionality that cannot be provided by default functionality by the Casambi firmware.

An example of the functionality would be to create heat maps of people’s movements in a retail application.

The Casambi cloud acts as a central point for managing configurations and sharing accesses to networks.

Networks can be shared to the cloud so that they can be used and configured from multiple mobile devices. When sharing, it is possible to select between various access modes that suit different situations.

When managing larger installations, it is also possible to use a site system, that allows grouping multiple networks together into a single ‘site’ and the access rights to an individual network or ‘site’ are shared through user accounts. The ‘site’ system requires that either Bluetooth or internet access is available to associated networks.

Customers can customize and fine-tune the behaviour of the Casambi solution and products to fit the purpose. This includes changing the branding, such as names and icons, and technical settings. These profiles are distributed to mobile devices and units from the cloud.

Access to a network can also be shared over the internet, thanks to the cloud. This requires that a gateway service will be set up in the network. A gateway is formed on a single mobile device running the Casambi App. Through the gateway other devices with proper credentials to the network can control and configure the luminaires from any location.

When gathering sensor data the gateway is used to relay sensor data to the cloud which will aggregate and store it. These data points can be then be queried by a third-party service later for further analysis and action.