OpenBeacon Active RFID Project





= Talk at OSHUG #39 in London =

Excited to meet you at OSHUG #39 in London for my [[Media:LowPowerToThePeople.pdf|Low Power to the People!]] talk. See you on 19 March 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.

Find more information about the presented new OpenBeacon NG tag hardware and software here.

= New OpenBeacon Tag with Bluetooth Smart =

The Internet of Things finally has its official Bluetooth Smart URL beacons! We sure could not wait till some official hardware is around, so we added support for the physical web packet protocol to existing OpenBeacon tags.

We turned our existing nRF51822 base OpenBeacon tag into the ultimate hacking, fuzzing and pentesting tool for Bluetooth Low Energy.

We strongly believe that the future of the Internet of Things can be privacy enabled and can work distributed without selling your soul to large cloud services. Please join our project for enabling that vision!

Introduction
This site collects user and developer documentation for the Open Source and Open Hardware Active 2.4 GHz RFID reader system and our Open Source and Open Hardware active RFID tags.

See OpenBeacon Tracker API Installation for setting up the server API and example code applications on your own server. Feel free to browse our git source code repository or download the source code as Unix tar.bz2 archive file or Windows ZIP File file

OpenBeacon Hardware Projects
For our latest hardware - please visit our new Bluetooth Smart OpenBeacon Tag web site.

RFID Realtime Tracking System
Location tracking using OpenBeacon tags can be implemented by running a OpenBeacon firmware that regularly transmits beacon packets. Such packets can then be received by OpenBeacon EasyReaderPoE base stations in the vicinity. Signals received by one or more base stations can then be used to estimate the position of the tag. Optional encryption can make sure, that only base stations inside the system can read the packet information.

Such an OpenBeacon based system has been deployed:
 * Proximity Tag Data was used to build social network graph for second day over all tag IDs in the lounge area of the Brucon Conference in 2011 (in [[Media:BruCON2011-OpenBeacon-RFID.pdf|PDF]] and [[Media:BruCON2011-OpenBeacon-RFID.png|PNG]] format). You can also find the live version of this graph (including source code).]]
 * Next HOPE conference - OpenAMD deployment of our new ARM based Ethernet Reader
 * Library of University TH Wildau in Berlin, Gemany (2009, ongoing)
 * 1500 attendees at HOPE Conference in new York, USA (2008, HackersOnPlanetEarth)
 * 800-1000 attendees at Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Germany (2006, 2007 and 2008)

Indoor Locationing
A compact hardware version of the OpenBeacon USBnode base station is connected to a PDA device or laptop and receives beacon packets from stationary placed beacons. The base station computes its own position in respect to the deployed beacons and transmits this information to the PDA. The PDA can display a map or other location based information to the user.

Such an OpenBeacon based system has been deployed:
 * JMB – Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany (permanent demo installation since 2008)
 * ongoing development in the EU project POSEIDON

Social Networking
The SocioPatterns sensing platform employs wearable electronic badges to sense sustained face-to-face proximity between persons –a proxy observable for social contact– with a fine spatial and temporal resolution. It has so far been utilized in fourteen deployments in which the SocioPatterns team was directly involved. Further deployments are being prepared. The platform has additionally been adopted by other research groups and commercial entities which have deployed it and/or are preparing future deployments. Complementing the development of this sensing platform, the SocioPatterns team also works on the development of tools and techniques to facilitate the representation, analysis and visualization of the data obtained from this platform.

Background information on OpenBeacon social networking features as used in our sister project SocioPatterns.org:
 * Close Encounters in a Pediatric Ward: Measuring Face-to-Face Proximity and Mixing Patterns with Wearable Sensors
 * Dynamics of Person-to-Person Interactions from Distributed RFID Sensor Networks
 * Live Social Semantics
 * Infections exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland (2009)
 * European Semantic Web Conference in Heraklion, Greece (2009)
 * Congrès de la Société Française d’Hygiène Hospitalière in Nice, France (2009)

Wireless Remote Control System
The OpenBeacon RF interface can be combined with a dimmer for halogen lamps and can respond to transmissions from an OpenBeacon Ethernet Base station. Commands to control the brightness of the lamps in real time can be transmitted via Ethernet from a central computer and broadcasted to several lamps via an OpenBeacon Ethernet base station on each floor level.

Such an OpenBeacon based system has been deployed:
 * Blinkenlights Stereoscope art installation for the “Nuit Blanche” with OpenBeacon remote control of 960 lamps in realtime in each window of the City Hall of Toronto, Canada (2008)

= Getting Started with OpenBeacon =


 * Clone our Source code from the OpenBeacon git repository
 * Head over to our Video Tutorials
 * 3D Live Visualization Software Leicas Dream, get Code
 * Tracker Protocol
 * List of currently supported hardware platforms
 * Setting up the OpenBeacon tag development environment
 * List of OpenBeacon Tag Encryption Keys as used on different venues
 * Frequently Asked Questions
 * sam7utils-0.2.1-bm for flashing the AT91SAM7 cpu
 * Protocol Plugin for wireshark
 * A list of all OpenBeacon related pages in this wiki for further information

OpenBeacon Hardware Development

 * Overview
 * Active 2.4GHz RFID Proximity and Tracking Tag
 * [[Media:OpenBeacon-Proximity-Tag_PCB.pdf|PCB overview and parts placement]]
 * [[Media:OpenBeacon-Proximity-Tag_SCH.pdf|Active 2.45Ghz Proximity RFID Tag schematics]]
 * [[Media:OpenBeacon-Proximity-Tag_BOM.pdf|Bill of Materials]]
 * Gerber Files for PCB production
 * Active 2.4GHz RFID Tracking-Only Tag
 * Schematics
 * PCB Layout
 * Encryption Keys used
 * Readers and Base Stations
 * OpenBeacon USB
 * OpenBeacon USB 2 Active 2.4GHz Reader with rechargeable battery, sensors and Bluetooth support