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The Internet of Things, beacons and The Physical Web are today’s hot topics. Soon we’ll be surrounded by small intelligent sensor nodes that analyze the environment and offer people more content on their smartphones.

12x funded already and still (when i’m writing this post) 10 days to go. Ruuvi, a Finnish company that is developing the next-gen 100% open-source sensor beacon platform designed especially for makers, developers and IoT companies, launched a campaign to collect $10,000 and they are risking to reach more than $150,000.

RuuviTag is a stand-alone Bluetooth 5 ready sensor beacon platform. It can be used as a standard Eddystone / iBeacon proximity beacon but it has the potential to be so much more.

By having a way to measure:

• Ambient temperature
• Relative humidity
• Barometric pressure
• Altitude
• Acceleration

It’s possible to cover several use-cases. And no need to worry about charging the device: the battery has the potential to last up to 10 years depending on the SW used.

RuuviTag is compatible with both Android (4.3.2 or higher) and iOS (8.0 or higher) mobile devices.

You can realize geofencing alerts, physical web, geotagging, educational applications and more. On the Kickstarter campaign official page, you can find several applications examples. It is cheap ($20 for one pieces, with incremental discounts) and open source as well!

Technical Specifications

• Nordic Semiconductor nRF52832 SoC
• Bosch BME280 environmental sensor (RuuviTag+)
• LIS2DH12 3-axis accelerometer (RuuviTag+)
• Integrated NFC antenna
• CR2450 / CR2477 battery (up to 10 years, depending on the SW used)
• -40°C to +85°C (requires a high temperature battery, CR2450HR)
• More than 500m (1650 feet) open-air range (depending on the environment and transmission power used)

Normal Lithium coin cell batteries are usually performing ok between -10°C and +70°C (-4F° to 158°F). Please also note that walls etc. will decrease the range.

Because the nRF52 is a future proof system-on-chip software radio, also other protocols apart from Nordic Semiconductor’s own Bluetooth stack can be used. There are several option available and RuuviTag is a supported platform for example with Apache Mynewt which is a really cool open-source project:

Nordic offers a protocol stack for ANT and RuuviTag is also a Wirepas Connectivity compatible platform

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