Bitmanufactory LTD — Milosch Meriac

Open Hardware for Open Beacons

Wireless Proximity Sensors

for Contact Tracing &

Real-Life Social Network Logging

Find out about OpenBeacon ...

Accurate Logging of Social Contacts.

Left: One of the sixty-nine daily diagrams of contact activity. Right: Thumbnail of the poster with the complete visualization and accompanying text. You can find detailed information here. — **Left**: One of the sixty-nine daily diagrams of contact activity.
**Right**: Thumbnail of the poster with the complete visualization and accompanying text. You can find detailed information here.

Offline Logging.

Introduction

Our OpenBeacon project is uniquely suited for modeling epidemics by decentralized tracking of human and animal interaction.

The OpenBeacon.org project provides Active 2.4 GHz RFID Realtime Proximity and Position Tracking using the BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) compatible nRF51822 chip from Nordic Semiconductors.

Location tracking using OpenBeacon tags can be implemented by running an OpenBeacon proximity tag firmware that regularly transmits beacon packets. Such packets can then be received by OpenBeacon base stations in the vicinity. Signals received by one or more base stations can then be used to determine the position of each tag in real time.

The proximity feature additionally allows to resolve human contacts by detecting other tags in a range of up to 6 meters and a resolution of approximately 0.5 meters. Once a contact is detected, that information is forwarded by the surrounding PoE Ethernet readers to the server infrastructure. Due to the shielding effect of the body, face-to-face contacts can be accurately detected. Optional encryption can make sure, that only base stations inside the system can read the packet information.

On this page you can find the OpenBeacon proximity tag hardware design and the firmware source code. You can find more information here:

OpenBeacon NG Active 2.4GHz RFID Proximity Tag based on the nRF51822 chip from Nordic Semiconductors.
SocioPatterns.org research project on High-Resolution Social Networks from Wearable Proximity Sensors
Contact us for further information and for alternative licenses to GPL.

Hardware Specification

Low power 3D accelerometer for activity & movement detection
OpenBeacon proximity & tracking protocol for measuring time and distance of a rag sighting.
8MB of external flash for offline-logging of tag-to-tag proximity encounters
Bluetooth low energy protocol option
32-bit ARM Cortex M0 CPU based on the nRF51822 SoC from Nordic Semiconductors)
256KB flash with 16KB RAM

Early OpenBeacon Ethernet Reader with Power-Over-Ethernet feature.

Live Visualization and Centralized Logging.

The tags transmit encrypted live notifications of tags in their proximity - and their approximate distance. By placing network based readers in relevant areas, the tag-to-tag sightings are collected centrally - either for logging or for live display of the user interaction.

Below you can see a short video showing how tag-to-tag interaction is detected and a notification broadcasted to the network infrastructure.

The mentioned Live Social Semantics project integrates real-time face-to-face social interaction detection using active RFID, with linked data from the semantic web, and data for social networking sites. The system was deployed at two conferences during the spring of 2009. This movie includes excerpts from the real-time visualisation during the Hypertext'09 conference and the online social network browsing tool.

For more information on Live Social Semantics see sociopatterns.org . Wouter’s original video can be found at Vimeo .

The song "Dreamer" in the video was created by Geraint Luff - get his Album "Sky Full of Songs" on geraintluff.co.uk , listen to it on Spotify or on SoundCloud.

OpenBeacon Ethernet Reader - Interactive 3D Model.

Full Transparency.

Have full control & visibility.

By providing full firmware sources and the hardware design for our tags, the security and privacy implications can be verified.

Build your own tags...

If you want, you are free to manufacture the tags yourself. For that purpose you can find the schematics and hardware designs here. The tag hardware is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License which specifically allows commercial usage - as long as you mention the origin of our original design openly.

You can choose to use our services for bulk orders and for custom hardware development based on this and other designs we created in the past. Any support for our project is highly appreciated and allows us to continue working on this great project.

... or get some pre-built from us

We have tags on stock right now. If you want to support our project by buying some tags, please send us an email to order tags. The tag price is 35 USD per tag plus a flat USD 30 shipping fee. Volume discounts start at 40 tags or more.

Above you can see the OpenBeacon Tag Programmer - this fixture can be also used to dump logfiles from the tag. Below you can see the cross-section of a tag holder.

Acknowledgements

Although the code contributions are acknowledged in the source code headers and history log files of the github repository, this project lives from invaluable user contributions like rigorous testing, constant suggestion of new features and regular real-life deployments in the field.

The OpenBeacon Team wants to thank Ciro Cattuto from the ISI Foundation for the great collaboration during the joint development, the ongoing moral support and innovative deployments of our systems.

We especially want to thank Ciro and the SocioPatterns collaboration for providing the scientific background for our platform, the media exposure and the deployments needed for the survival of our project.

License Information

Please contact us for obtaining a dual-licensed closed source license.

This program is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation (version 2). This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License v2 for more details.

Background Information

OpenBeacon.org

The OpenBeacon.org project was founded by Milosch Meriac and Brita Meriac in 2006 at the Berlin located company Bitmanufaktur GmbH as an open platform for active RFID applications operating in the license free 2.4GHz ISM band. OpenBeacon is based on Open Source software and a very flexible and a open design of a reprogrammable low cost Open Source Active 2.4GHz RFID hardware module. The RFID tag and reader firmware sources are available under GPL license the and tag hardware schematics are available under the open Creative Commons license. We encourage the development of new ideas for OpenBeacon setups and firmware improvements.

SocioPatterns.org

SocioPatterns is an international research collaboration that uses wearable proximity sensors to map human spatial behavior in a variety of environments such as schools, hospitals, offices and social gatherings. During the last 6 years, the SocioPatterns researchers have designed and supervised over 25 data collection campaigns in 10 countries, involving over 50,000 subjects. The resulting high-resolution social networks, shared with the public whenever possible, have been used to investigate human mobility, time-varying social networks, infectious disease dynamics, location-based services, and more. The results are reported in 30+ peer-reviewed scientific publications and have been featured by the international press.

The SocioPatterns collaboration was founded by researchers and developers from the following institutions and companies: