OpenBeacon News

OpenBeacon is a free design for an active RFID device which operates in the 2.4GHz ISM band. The device contains a unique serial number, but may have other information. OpenBeacon is designed as a transceiver device and therefore both transmits and receives radio waves. The intention of this project is to offer a wide range of use cases such as visitor or item tracking and wireless remote control with a free self-contained and low-cost RFID design.

Blinkenlights

OpenBeacon got a new shiny face with Blinkenlights. Blinkenlights is participating at this years Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Canada. The project is called Stereoscope and is set up in the Toronto City Hall. Stereoscope transforms the two opposing curved facades of the City hall towers into remote-controlled screens. Animations with up to 16 grey scales can be shown on this setup. People can interact by creating their own animations for the screen or joining in a game of pong.

 

The dimming controlling in each of the 960 windows of the two curved tower facades is done with a special designed OpenBeacon pcb, which will be soon released under creative common license. An OpenBeacon-Ethernet device is connected to the local ethernet and transmitts the signals to the dimmers in each floor. Read more in our Wiki pages.

 

Toronto City Hall at daytime
... and with Stereoscope taking over at night

The Last HOPE

OpenBeacon tracking system was up and running and with an amazing visualisation by the Attendee Meta-Data project team at The Last HOPE in New York: See here our videos and photos from the Last HOPE conference.

SocioPatterns

The network team from ISI foundation implemented the OpenBeacon tracking system for an experimental setup on protocolling hidden patterns in social dynamics. The deployment took place from 26-29 May, 2008 during the workshop “Sociophysics: status and perspectives” in Villa Gualino, in Turin, Italy. The visualization and further project details can be seen at the project website http://www.sociopatterns.org

24C3

24C3 videos: See our 24C3 Sputnik RFID tracking realtime visualization videos

24C3 reader positions: See the newly released schematics of the building with all reader positions marked.

24C3 Sputnik log data released: At people.openpcd.org/meri/openbeacon/sputnik/data/24c3/ you can find the bzip2 compressed text file containing all tag sightings at the 24C3 congress. Floor plans and Nick lists will follow soon.

JMB

In cooperation with EMIKA, a research group from FHTW - University of Applied Science, OpenBeacon has been successfully put into operation at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. It provides localization information for a new mobile museum information system that is currently under development. Realization, practical experiences and first conclusions with OpenBeacon were presented at the Congress for Wireless Communication Information (WCI) in Berlin: presentation paper from Dr. Mohnke (EMIKA), our presentation poster.

23C3

See the first OpenBeacon Sputnik tracking sytem at 23C3 in Berlin: Sputnik v0.1