Design win; Nordic’s Bluetooth chips make for a minimalist beacon design
Reteneo’s stripped-down iOS and Android-compatible beacon platform supports $15 per month subscription model and is based on – in fact, contains not much more than – a Nordic nRF51822 SoC.
The Reteneo Pucks themselves are the size of regular [ice] hockey pucks and feature nothing more than a Nordic nRF51822 SoC, antenna, and two watch batteries. The ultra low power operating characteristics of the nRF51822 will allow the puck to run for an average of two years in continuous operation. Reteneo says another major benefit of the Nordic nRF51822 SoC is its ability to do firmware updates over-the-air, a platform feature that Reteneo plans to include in the future.
The ‘Puck’ platform is designed to allow multiple retailers and merchants to offer beacon-based services to consumers via a single ‘Reteneo Life’ app instead of having to download a separate app for each beacon. Reteneo Pucks continuously advertise their presence to any passing iOS or Android Bluetooth Smart Ready smartphone within a range of up to 100m. All Pucks are remotely maintained by Reteneo as part of the subscription service and replaced as and when required (e.g. when their batteries are about to expire).
"We can foresee a day where every retailer or merchant has beacons, but we cannot foresee a day where consumers are willing to have hundreds of different beacon-compatible apps on their smartphones," comments Cesar Rego, CEO of Reteneo. "It’s never going to happen given that people are already complaining that they have too many apps on their smartphones as it is. That’s why we’ve taken a different approach and designed our beacon platform to work with a single app that is relevant to all retailers and merchants within a particular locality."
In operation the Reteneo Pucks continuously advertise their presence to any passing iOS or Android Bluetooth Smart Ready smartphone within a range of up to 100m. Once the Reteneo Life app is running on the device, it reads this advertised ‘feed’ and contacts a cloud database and asks if there are any current offers or promotions attached. If the answer is ‘yes’ the app then checks with end user’s stated in-app preferences to see if the offer is something the end-user has expressed an interest in. If it is, the user will be immediately alerted of the offer via the app.
Titus adds, "The only ‘advanced’ feature we did include was a Puck identification and battery level monitoring running on the nRF51822’s embedded ARM Cortex M0 MCU that anonymously supplies this data to our cloud servers as part of the beacon polling process. This is used by Reteneo in order to notify customers when and where to replace installed Pucks, that we simply post to them as part of their Reteneo Puck subscription service.”
"The beacon market is in a very early stage of its evolution and developing at a rapid pace," comments Geir Langeland, Nordic Semiconductor’s Director of Sales & Marketing. "How the finer details will pan out remains to be seen, and this is attracting an enormous amount of innovation which is extremely exciting…Nordic Semiconductor’s wireless technology is …at the heart of various leading-edge beacon solutions."
Nordic Semiconductor; www.nordicsemi.com
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