Design and Development of Asset Tracking System, using Bluetooth Low Energy Technology

Abstract

Internet of Things is a fast growing industry, with each quarter consumption and requirement report it looks quite clear the growth in this domain is 24.9%. The global Internet of Things(IoT) market stood at USD 212.72 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 1,567 billion by 2025, exhibiting a CAGR of 22.6% during the forecast period. In this IoT based development one of the major subjects which is used to address various needs and demand of Internet of Things is Bluetooth Low Energy.

My project revolves around creating firmware for Bluetooth Low Energy on nRF52840 development kit which will act as a Gateway and Card sensor for the Asset Tracking System. So we will be using all the toolkits and nRF52840 development kit from the Nordic semiconductor for design and development of the Bluetooth Low Energy part of the project

CoreFragment Technologies Pvt Ltd is on forefront for getting a best possible market share in this IoT market. The present Bluetooth Low Energy project is based on Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 System on Chip. We have developed our own customized embedded hardware using nRF52840 controller for addressing the solution. But major development and testing is done on nRF52840 Development Kit provided by Nordic Semiconductor.

The project is broadly divided into two main parts that is Gateway and Card Sensor. Gateway work is to track the card sensor whenever it comes into the vicinity of Gateway and then collecting the required information from the Card sensor it does the required processing on the acquired information and then sends it to the Cloud using MQQT protocol. On the other hand Card sensor work is to acquire all the required data from the various sensors that are attached to it and process them and put them into required data format, ready to send when ever asked by Gateway. Apart from this we will be designing a customized hardware using Renesas controller which is capable of processing an Artificial Intelligence based algorithm, which further boost the efficiency of our system.

Card Sensor acquires information through sensors using I2C protocol, thus the sensors that are used are also capable of having I2C communication. One of the main advantage of using I2C sensors is we can connect as much as roughly 100 sensors to our host controller using just two pin of the controller. Also there is not much effect of noise on the overall digitalized information that is been shared between two module using I2C communication. The card sensor will only pass the information to the main Gateway once the card sensor comes in the vicinity if the Gateway device. Using Bluetooth Low Energy we are saving battery life and thus increasing the product life by using various low power modes. Which concludes that once the module is deployed in field it will last for months and years, without any requirement of service, which is very important and valuable point for a battery operated devices.