At present, there are more and more options for wireless SoC chips, from the European and American manufacturers to the domestic semiconductors. How to choose a suitable wireless chip for product development? The following aspects need to be considered. Wireless Technology: The current popular low-power wireless technologies are including Wi-Fi, small wireless, LoRa, Bluetooth, Thread, ZigBee, NFC, Private 2.4G, NB-IoT, 2G, 3G, 4G, etc., The wireless technologies commonly used in factory automation and smart home including Wi-Fi, small wireless, BLE, Thread, ZigBee, NFC. The following figure compares the advantages and disadvantages of these different wireless protocols in data transmission bandwidth, distance and power consumption. An appropriate solution should be selected according to the usage scenario. Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi is suitable for high-speed video data transmission, but its power consumption is relatively high. At present, there are fewer mainstream low-power Wi-Fi chips on the market. The core uses ARM M3 or M4 core, which runs simple RTOS, and only supports 802.11b/g/n mode, low bandwidth, but can meet the application of dry battery power supply. ZigBee: The best choice of smart home, the status is being challenged by BLE MESH. But after the launch of ZigBee 3.0, various systems can be interconnected, and the compatibility of the platform is much better than before. Sub-1G: Because of its stability and long transmission distance, it can be used in various industrial control fields. The TX peak current is large, but the system is in sleep mode at other times. Thus, the overall power consumption is low. NFC: The function is which mobile phones must be carried with. Public transportation systems and access control systems are mostly adopted by RFID and NFC solutions. LoRa: Unique spread spectrum technology, +20 dBm transmit power, low power consumption, long-distance, the disadvantage is low bandwidth utilization and low data throughput. Power Consumption Always keep the end users’ experience in mind. If the battery fails, even the most ideal product will be abandoned. What kind of power supply method can be used? Coin cell, dry battery, lithium battery? Coin cells are popular due to their low cost, small size and lightweight. Considering that the battery life of these products is crucial, and the coin cell can only provide a peak current of about 5 mA without being damaged. If you drive a larger current peak, the battery capacity will be affected. RF transmit power: The transmit power of Bluetooth is restively low. Usually, only 5 dBm transmit power is supported, generally refer to 0 dBm transmit power according to specifications. ZigBee, small wireless transmission power can reach 20 dBm. (More than 20 dBm cannot pass the safety test). MCU operating power consumption: Because the same ARM core of the wireless SoC is used, the power consumption is similar to each other. But it is necessary to evaluate the MCU running time from wakes up statu...

The three kinds of bikesharing programs: Conventional bikesharing Dockless bikesharing Dockless bikesharing with electronic-docking stations To address the negative impacts associated with dockless bikesharing, local governments have started to require riders to return bikes to designated locations, or electronic-docking stations on the curb, while simultaneously limiting the number of dockless shared bikes throughout the city. They are referred to as geo-fenced areas, in that they use satellite positioning technology or Bluetooth technology to determine whether bikes are returned inside the designated areas and penalize riders when violations occur. Most of these electronic-docking stations are virtual docking stations which are based on Beidou navigation satellite technology(a satellite positioning technology similar to GPS) and Bluetooth technology. Dockless shared bikes can be parked in these electronic-docking stations. Promoting electronic-docking stations is also beneficial for operators to dispatch and maintain shared bikes. Top benefits of Bluetooth electronic fence Through installing several BLE signal launchers on the ground to draw a boundary fence region, the signal receiver (electronic BLE tag attached to the bike) receives the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) signal which the launcher sends out, and then analyzes these RSSIs using SVM (support vector machine). Finally the SVM can judge these signals to know the bike belongs to in the fence or outside the fence. As the electronic fence system based on Bluetooth modules with higher accuracy and stability are implemented in major shared bicycles, such as Meituan, Harrow, cyan and Didi. As a well-known Bluetooth module manufacturer in China, Shenzhen RF-star Technology Co., Ltd., has provided empowerment for the smart parking solutions of many domestic and foreign manufacturers with its advanced Beacon positioning technology, helping to relieve the pressure of urban parking and assisting the construction of smart cities. Beacon products such as AR1, AR4, and Bluetooth modules with Beacon function RF-BM-4044B4, RF-BM-BG22A1, RF-BM-BG22A3 are all worthy of attention.

Recently, RF-star, a veteran wireless IoT company in China, announced that it has joined hands with Texas Instruments to launch several Wi-SUN products, focusing on the development of wide-area mesh, hoping to provide customers with integrated solution development environment of end-edge-cloud in the field of industrial IoT and public facilities. The products disclosed by the company include a variety of Wi-SUN communication modules based on the TI CC1352 and CC1312 series, which support Sub1G multi-band and 2.4GHz communication, and support self-organizing networks by mesh and multi-hop. The distance of a single hop can reach several kilometers. Development history of Wi-SUN Even for most people in the IoT circle, Wi-SUN is a new technology. Actually it has been created for more than a dozen years. However it floated only in recent years after more major chip vendors and device manufacturers joined the technology alliance and started to promote the technology. As early as 2008, there was no unified wireless communication standard for the Wide Area network in the industry, while there were various wireless communication protocols in the industry at that time. What these protocols have in common is that they adopted the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. But they still cannot achieve interconnection in the application layer. In order to solve this complex problem, Wi-SUN FAN (Wireless Utility Field Area Network), a large-scale wireless mesh network based on IP technology came into being. The standard is committed to becoming the global wireless mesh network standard with interoperability. With the implementation of the standard, Wi-SUN alliance was established in 2012. Currently, the alliance has more than 250 members worldwide, including Cisco, ARM, Texas Instruments and Itron, etc. Over the past two years, the Wi-SUN standard has matured, and hundreds of millions of Wi-SUN enabled devices have been deployed worldwide. It is widely used in public utilities and smart city facilities due to its feature of enabling smart meters, smart street lights and other devices to be connected to a public network. Wi-SUN technology is an open specification based on IEEE 802.15.4g, IEEE 802 and IETF IPv6 standard protocols. Wi-SUN FAN is a mesh network protocol that support self organizing and self-healing functions. Each device in the network can communicate with its neighbors, and signals can be transmit to each node in the mesh, making very long range hops in between. Wi-SUN features long distance transmission, security, high scalability, interoperability, easy deployment, mesh network, as well as low power consumption (the battery life of Wi-SUN modules has a chance to It can be used for ten years). It is widely used in smart meters and family intelligent energy management (HEMS) controllers for communication, and is also conducive to building a wide-area large-scale internet of things. The Wi-SUN standard mainly consists of two sub-specifications, namely FAN and HAN. ...

The traditional way of personnel clock-in is to use fingerprints. By registering personal fingerprints in advance, press the fingerprints on the fingerprint attendance machine to confirm the punch-in of personnel on duty. However, the fingerprint attendance machine has the problems of low efficiency, high cleanliness requirement of fingerprints, and the possibility of punch-in failure. Especially at the special moment when the novel coronavirus is raging, people should try to minimize contact between people, and extra attention should be paid to disinfection and avoiding cross-infection of items that are in public touch. For office workers, they need to touch the fingerprint attendance machine during on and off duty. It is difficult to avoid the potential risk of cross-infection. After all, at workplaces, the one who comes into contact with the most people every day, except for door handles, is the fingerprint attendance machine. So, how to realize the attendance of employees in this special period? In the face of complex personnel contact, the best way to avoid cross-infection is contactless clock-in. At this time, Beacon attendance punch-in has become a good alternative. RF-star launched the smart Beacon work attendance solution, using a contactless attendance system to help employees complete punch-in through mobile phones and assist companies to avoid the risk of cross-infection. As long as the mobile phone turns on Bluetooth and the personnel pass by the work attendance device, the personnel identification and his attendance can be realized. Help company managers get rid of various inefficient attendance management methods such as fingerprint attendance, USB flash disk copying attendance data and signature attendance confirmation. The Bluetooth Attendance solution is based on Beacon technology. Broadcast Beacon signals regularly through the Beacon product RF-B-AR1, RF-B-AR4. The punch-in location binding information is carried in MAC address, UUID, Major, Minor and others in the broadcast packets. The personnel uses a mobile phone with Bluetooth enabled to search for the Beacon signal in the air to confirm the punch-in attendance and location. In the Beacon work attendance system, walk into the office area, directly take out the mobile phone, open the APP and punch in finished. No need to punch in on the attendance machine with fingerprints. The Beacon work attendance solution is flexible and convenient, but it also faces the risk of being cheated to punch in. Here come questions. Can Beacon punch-in solve the problem of entrusted attendance? How to confirm that the employee has arrived at the office? Can Beacon punch-in solve the problem of entrusted attendance? There are many APPs and tools for cheating on attendance on the Internet. Roughly the following methods: 1. Location simulation, cracked by GPS and baseband module 2. Wi-Fi simulation 3. Root or jailbreak the phone 4. Customize the mobile phone, crack from the hardware In addition t...

Looking for a way to measure your oil/water levels without ever opening a storage tank? Our Bluetooth technology enables the level gauge to do this. By building a Bluetooth module into the liquid level gauge, the liquid level gauge can transmit data such as its power level, sensing signal strength, liquid level data information, and alarm information to the terminal device in real-time through the wireless network. Thus you can check your liquid level on your phone at any time and anywhere.

Time zipped by and the bell for the year 2022 is about to ring. At this beautiful moment of bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new, RF-star held the Annual Banquet for 2021 at Chengdu where all staff gathered together to celebrate the achievements made in 2021 and expect a bright outlook for 2022. In the past year of 2021, RF-star has made numerous achievements and continues to develop in the IoT industry, which enables itself to be more professional and creative in wireless technology. Before the activities, each department leader made a report on their work for 2021. Then the chairman of the board, Mr.Kang Kai, made an achievement and progress summary of RF-star. He also talked about the company's annual sales achievements, which far exceeded initial expectations and mentioned the outlook for 2022, including several plans such as doubling overall sales in 2021 and expanding and relocating the Chengdu branch. Every success and progress of RF-star will not be possible without the support and help from everyone! After the Chairman’s speech, it comes to the award ceremony. The company awarded more than 20 awards to some outstanding staff, including the most excellent staff in 2021, sales champion award, the most outstanding team award and so on. Many young employees stepped onto the award-winning stage. They show the charming demeanor of RF-star young employees! After the award ceremony, all the staff moved to the hotel and share the banquet. During the banquet, the company held raffle draw activity and fun games, which brings endless rousing cheers and claps, also pushes the activity to its climax. The year 2022 is a new start for RF-star! With the enhancement of overall arrangements of the company, 2022 will be a more rapid development period. “Inclusive all-win and shape the future”. We have confident belief and wonderful wishes to keep close cooperation with all our customers to shape a better future!

The SIG released a new generation of Bluetooth Core Specification 5.2 at CES2020 in Las Vegas, including LE ISOCHRONOUS, LE PWOER CONTROL, LE ATTRIBUTE PROTOCOL. This article talks about LE ISOCHRONOUS. 1. BT 5.2 LE AUDIO Market As we all know, before BT 5.2, Bluetooth audio transmission used the classic Bluetooth A2DP mode for point-to-point data transmission. Now the emergence of Bluetooth LE Audio has broken the monopoly of classic Bluetooth on the audio market. At the 2020 CES, SIG announced that the new Core Specification BT 5.2 supports multi-stream Audio which will enable the transmission of multiple, independent, synchronized audio streams between an audio source device, such as TWS headphones, multi-room audio synchronization. LE Audio will also add Broadcast Audio, enabling an audio source device to broadcast one or more audio streams to an unlimited number of audio sink devices. Broadcast Audio can be widely used in airports, bars, gyms, cinemas, and conference centers and other sites. The emergence of BT 5.2 hits a blow to the Apple TWS, and provides support for multi-channel simultaneous audio transmission. 2. BT 5.2 LE Audio Transmission Principle The Bluetooth LE Isochronous Channels function is a new method of using Bluetooth LE to transfer data between devices. This feature provides a mechanism to ensure synchronization between multiple sink devices receiving data from the same source. The protocol stipulates that each frame of data sent by the Bluetooth transmitter will have a time limit, and the expired data (data that violates the time-bound validity period) that is not transmitted, is discarded. Consequently, the receiving devices receive data that is valid with respect to its age and acceptable latency to ensure the synchronization of data received by multiple slave devices. In order to realize the new function, ISOAL is a new layer in the Bluetooth stack which sits in the controller above the link layer. It provides flexibility in the way that lower layers of the stack and upper layers work together, allowing to provide data stream segmentation and reassembly service. The ISOAL provides segmentation, fragmentation, reassembly, and recombination services for the conversion of the SDUs from the upper layer to the PDUs of the baseband resource manager and vice versa. The ISOAL uses fragmentation/recombination or segmentation/reassembly operations to convert service data units (SDU) into protocol data units (PDU), or vice versa. The ISOAL controller accepts or generates SDUs through the supported 1M and 2M encoding PHYs. The maximum length of each SDU is the Max_SDU. Use the HCI ISO data packet to transmit the SDU to the upper layer or from the lower layer to the air. For the application requirements of LE connection mode and non-connection mode, the BT 5.2 LE AUDIO protocol specifies two data stream transmission framework models. 3. BT 5.2 Synchronous data stream transmission based on LE connection Connection-oriented isochron...

HVAC application comes. How can BLE or Wi-Fi work in HVAC? RF-star BLE solution enables the HVAC to be digitally intelligent. Recent development of IoT and digital technologies created a new way for the HVAC industry to build smart energy management solutions. Such technologies are more oriented to equip the HVAC system with capability of timely and precise perception of fluctuating cooling or heating demand of its serviced space. The system can hence intelligently adjust thecooling or heating outputbased on such perception. Adopting Bluetoothlow energy technologies significantly facilitates HVAC vendors in implementing such new smart solutions.

The IoT technology is constantly updated and iterated, and the indoor positioning technology has also undergone earth-shaking changes. From room-level positioning, decimeter-level positioning to high-precision centimeter positioning, the evolution of technology is always unexpected! Various positioning technologies of indoor positioning solutions appear in turn. Which technology is most suitable for indoor positioning? Let’s take a comprehensive perspective to understand the Bluetooth indoor positioning solution. Overview of Beacon Indoor Positioning Technology There are two Beacon indoor positioning technologies: 1. Passive location: Use the Bluetooth gateway to capture the broadcast data transmitted by the beacon on the person/object. The gateway is deployed and installed in the environment. And the gateway will return the collected beacon data to the server through the network. The server obtains the real-time position coordinates of the beacon through a positioning algorithm based on the coordinates known by the gateway. 2. Active position: Use the APP on a mobile device to get the Beacon broadcast data. The APP will have a positioning algorithm. Based on Beacon broadcast data, we can know the person's location who holds the mobile device. The location and navigation in the room are realized through APP or Applet, which is suitable for shopping malls, parking lots, and hospitals. Features of Beacon indoor positioning technology Compared with Wi-Fi positioning technology, Beacon technology suffers less environmental interference. Beacon product is based on the battery power supply. With the advantages of Bluetooth low energy consumption, long service life, small size, and the high penetration rate of Beacon devices, Bluetooth positioning is the most commonly used technology in indoor positioning technology. In daily life, smartphones and smart speakers support Bluetooth. The popularity and mass use of Bluetooth makes Bluetooth chips at a low price. And the BLE price is lower than traditional UWB/RFID solutions. How does Bluetooth realize indoor positioning? The Bluetooth working frequency is 2400 MHz ~ 2483.5 MHz. When Bluetooth initiates a broadcast, in addition to its own MAC address, the strength of the Bluetooth signal will also be broadcasted, namely RSSI information. The RSSI reflects the signal strength of the broadcast data packet. According to the RSSI, when the Bluetooth receiver is closer to the transmitter, the signal strength is stronger, on the contrary, will be weaker. The relationship between the signal strength and the distance from the transmitter can be found through the transformation of signal strength. By deploying a Bluetooth transmitter in the room, namely a beacon, the Bluetooth receiver can determine its indoor location after receiving the RSSI signal broadcasted by the transmitter. This positioning method is called active positioning, and the positioning accuracy is 3 meters to 4 meters. Through a reasonable algorith...