IB003N-SHT Honest Review

Not long ago, I bought this beacons from Alibaba. What attracted me most and main consideration of choosing this beacons against a number of China made beacons are the following:

1. It can broadcast 3 frames(Ibeacon, eddystone(URL or UID) and Accelerometer)
2. It has a specialize temperature sensor
3. It has buzzer

For some reasons, the Chinese seller had delayed the delivery considering that I paid expensive shipping charge($30) but the delivery time took almost a month which is just like having it shipped for free via postal mail(small packets) but I didn't mind it since the product I bought are really loaded with tons features.

Ok the item arrived and my initial testing which is to check whether it really can broadcast the 3 frames and it worked. Days later, when I tried to check the data being broadcasted and verify if it really has all the goodies and to my surprised, I found that it is not what they claimed it be which really had disappointed me. Here are my actual findings:

1. Ibeacon and Temperature Sensor issue. According to their documentation, the temperature readings are being broadcasted at the major and minor (least significant bits). During my test, I could not find the major value and the minor value turns out to be the least significant bit. I reported this issue to the Chinese seller and after a few days of discussion, they have admitted that the major value is unusable. They did not mentioned this in the technical documentation they have provided nor on their advertisement. Another issue I found is that most of the time, the temperature reading is 0 which is weird and I found this to be a hardware defect.
2. Eddystone issue. The data being broadcasted is not Eddystone standard compliant. The main identifer of Eddystone "AAFE" is missing, I have confirmed this because even nRFConnect can not identify the frame as Eddystone. Their counting of UID begins at the "02" byte which is absolutely wrong. The transmittion power is missing. And worst is that when I tried to populate the characteristics "FFD02", the Eddystone frame goes blank which stunned or shocked me.
3. Buzzer Issue. 20dB is very loud, and based on their technical documentaion, it can be adjusted through GATT. But during my testing, the loudness could not be adjusted. With that loudness, I could hardly hear it.

After I found these defects, I stopped the testing of other features. I have already concluded that the IB003N-SHT is full of defects. I tried to negotiate with the Chinese seller by returning the product to them due to the above mentioned defects, but I got this reply from them:

"Our products have no defects, but if you are not satisfied, you may return the items to us. But pls do not include the batteries. We will deduct $2 for each item for the batteries. We will test each items after receiving them from you and we find no defects, we will refund your money. Shipping and delivery charge will be deducted."

I think this is not what I have expected from them, with this transaction, I would suffer $127 loss which way too much.

Reading Temperature and Humidity on AppsFactory Beacons

AppsFactory Beacons have SHT20 High precision Temperature and Humidity sensor embedded in them. Reading the values from the beacons is not that easy that is why this post is written which will serve as guide. Temperature and Humidity is important as it will allow building owners discover patterns that can not be detected by ordinary humans not unless of course humans are so super intelligent that they may not need tools to predict or discover patterns which could suggest something is just about to happen.

There are two ways to read the sensor data which are as follows:

1. can be read via GATT
2. can be included in the beacon advertisement data.

Here is the detail:

1. Reading the Temperature and Humidity via GATT Service

The data can be accessed via GATT Service 0xFFB0 see table below:

The characteristic 0xFFB3 is used to enable the measured Teperature and Humidity on the Advertisement Data. The possible values are as follows(2 bytes):

• 0x0 - Enable
• 0x00 - Disable 

Other values maybe entered to specify the rate which it will be advertised, example if 0x0F was entered means the temp and humidity will be advertised every 30 seconds. 

2. Reading the Temperature and Humidity from Beacon Advertisement Data

The Temperature and Humidity is included at the last bytes of the major and minor of the Ibeacon frame.

After obtaining the value, the conversion formula to get the actual values are as follows:

Beacon Scanner App Updated

Remember the app I created to scan Ibeacons and list them on screen and wrote about it that it is possible to modify the app to scan EddyStones as well? To prove it, I have decided to modify it myself. In case you haven't read the previous posts, here are the links:

A Simple Ibeacon Scanner App in Android

An Update to the Ibeacon Scanner App for Android

The a small change I made is to change the name of device whether it is an Ibeacon or an EddyStone-UID.

Like I said, the file DeviceScanActivity.java needs to be modified to detect the 3 Eddystone frames, but I only modified it to scan the UID frame on for demo purposes. And here is the code I insterted:

This is the raw data taken from Ibeacon Detector App:

And here is the resulting app:

How to Setup AppsFactory Beacons to Broadcast Ibeacon/EddyStone/TLM(Sensor Data)

AppsFactory Beacons Model A just arrived and has made me busy doing tests on each features that the beacons were design to have whether it really works. Doing the program was  not that easy and to see your design work as expected makes you happy.

One notable feature of the beacons is that it can be configured over the air using nRfConnect App for Android or IOS. And can be made to broadcast ibeacon, eddystone and sensor data at an alternating interval. the beacon is also capable of motion triggered broadcast but I haven't test this part yet.

BTW, the sensor data consists of acceleration and temperature data. I will this this part later.

I have designed the beacon to be configured at Bluetooth service 0xff70, and under this is characteristic 0x2a80. The possible values that can be enterered are the ff:
No advertisement: 0x01
iBeacon only: 0x02
Eddystone only:0x08
TLM only: 0x20
To broadcast all three frames : 0x02 + 0x08 + 0x20 = 0x2A

And here is the video:

How To Make China to Be not Aggressive

With all the current buzz about China being too aggressive by militarizing the South China Sea which include the West Philippine Sea, the world can still make China not to be too aggressive. I think these are the best ways to do it:

1. Send all Chinese back to their homeland. Would you believe that it took China just a decade to overtake the Filipinos as the biggest Asian community in the USA alone? The Philippines took almost 5 decades to send 3M Pinoys to the US. This could have been possible because most Chinese found their way through Canada and then went to the US.

2. Ignore Chinese presence all over the world. Do not buy China made product. By doing this, Robinsons, SM, and other big mall operators will lose their commercial viability since 80% of their products come from China, not to mention the owners.

3. DO not be an opportunist. Just because someone is rich you will want to accept his marriage proposal. Just because you are poor and it is your chance to become rich is not an excuse that you will not be labled as opportunist.

4. Maintain closer relationship with your allies and rely more on locally produced goods. Stop importing too much, even if the locally made products are inferior in terms of quality or more expensive, always remember that if you buy China made products, you are killing your country. The country should support R&D in electric motors and batteries to make electric vehicles. We already know how to manufacture solar panels so we can already achieve energy sufficiency. By doing this we can cut our imports by 50% since most of our imports are gasoline and energy related products.

5. Convince the US to ban all imports/exports to China like weapons, electronics, raw materials, chemicals, machineries, etc. The world could be at worst killing itself if they keep on buying products from China.

6. Ban all tourists coming from China even if they come from Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, or Taiwan. Chinese make up 20% of the population in South East Asia so be cautious about dealing with these countries. And even with this huge communities, fellow South East Asians should be aware of their presence and the future of their country. I think the local Chinese are also competing with Pinoys in obtaining US visas that is why it has become very to difficult to obtain US visa.

7. Ban Chinese ownership in strategic and important industries like Airline, Telecommunications, Broadcasting, Infrastructure Development. Look at what happened to the last purchased of MRT trains, until now those trains are not yet being used, the people behind those must be prosecuted and should be made liable and labled as terrorists.

8. You can not rely on the US as an ally since they have very healthy economic relationship with China and they look at the Philippines as a tiny country and of no significance to world affairs so why rely on US for military help? Why haven't Pinoys developed weapon systems that could have served as the source of the country's strength? It could not just have been more than that, the Government could have generated jobs. Or exported those weapons to support the local economy.

5 Indications that the IT Project is Fake

I got involved with different types of IT projects over the years and got scammed several times and wanted to share this based on experience. If you are in the same field you will agree with this too. Here are the 5 indications that the IT project is fake:

1. Measure the number of errors of the documents being handed to you. Yes, they are not Americans so it is an excuse to write carabao English or is it because they were hired for another reason? Errors(excluding those grammatical errors) in Technical Designs are those that are written to too specific. Instead of just writing: "Return an error if the customer code is not maintained in SAP Master Data"; the pretentious Technical Architect would write: "After obtaining customer code, you must check if the customer code exist in table lfa1". They should not be involving themselves in specifics but should just concentrate on higher level description and the different business scenarios. Giving too specific instructions would lead to more confusions and the programmer would just cut and paste which could lead to a more prolonged test period and you can not blame the programmer since you are invading his territory which he would immediately assume you are in full command which make their job a whole lot easier. Programming entails a lot of careful planning and meticulous design to produce a highly optimized solution. And giving too much information means you are the one who planned it and it is your design and not the programmer. There are a lot instance and I would say a major challenge to describe a certain specification and to hurdle such challenges, creativity and of course your competency is the key. The preparation of Technical Documents and Functional Specifications are more expensive than doing the actual programming or coding so you must realize that being a TA or BA or FA, you can already relax because you are on top of the Software Development Life Cycle, well that is where you are wrong.

2. Measure the competence of your peers. Do this secretly, if all your peers are female, you should begin to suspect something is going on.

3. Frequency of work and how fast it should be done and how many people have the same position like you have. Begin observing how they behave and all your movement must be calculated. The world's resources is scarse.

4. Other than your peers, how does the company's employees behave and the surrounding environment, how was it? Do they start offering other services or want to offer except that they just keep looking at you?

5. There are other circumstances where it is up to you to interpret which can trigger something in you that you think violates certain moral standards, do not ignore it. Your instincts does not lie to you.

Agencies In Metro Manila still Flourishes

Agencies(Companies who's clients are Companies that do not want to have regular employees) still flourishes in Metro Manila.This in spite of the fact that Pinoys opted to vote for a semi illiterate President who promised to eradicate contractualization.

Contractualization destabilizes livelihood of individuals. It makes the person in constant struggle to find decent jobs. It really makes me angry to hear recruiters having fun to find a guy that is willing to accept jobs on a contractual basis. This is what overloading of buses is like. Constant struggle just to get a place so that one can go home it's because there are no decent jobs on the country side, people are poor and have no knowledge to create opportunities and big companies take advantage of this situation. This vulnerability that is exposed for all scammers to take advantage of is what makes Agencies flourish. Even IT companies aka Agencies are there. They survive on big Companies that are not willing to hire employees and regularized them. I understand that they are poor but why do they make use of technology that they can't afford anyway? It is because they take advantage of the poor.

This is an unfair competition, one should be aware of this and should be able to crate a way to equalize or balance the competition. One should be aware that life is a like a rolling wheel, one may be on top today but he is not sure what is going to happen in the future. There is always a balancing force as one becomes powerful that is when the opposition intensifies their effort to ovethrow him.