Recently, RF-star, a veteran wireless IoT company in China, announced that it has joined hands with Texas Instruments to launch several Wi-SUN products, focusing on the development of wide-area mesh, hoping to provide customers with integrated solution development environment of end-edge-cloud in the field of industrial IoT and public facilities. The products disclosed by the company include a variety of Wi-SUN communication modules based on the TI CC1352 and CC1312 series, which support Sub1G multi-band and 2.4GHz communication, and support self-organizing networks by mesh and multi-hop. The distance of a single hop can reach several kilometers. Development history of Wi-SUN Even for most people in the IoT circle, Wi-SUN is a new technology. Actually it has been created for more than a dozen years. However it floated only in recent years after more major chip vendors and device manufacturers joined the technology alliance and started to promote the technology. As early as 2008, there was no unified wireless communication standard for the Wide Area network in the industry, while there were various wireless communication protocols in the industry at that time. What these protocols have in common is that they adopted the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. But they still cannot achieve interconnection in the application layer. In order to solve this complex problem, Wi-SUN FAN (Wireless Utility Field Area Network), a large-scale wireless mesh network based on IP technology came into being. The standard is committed to becoming the global wireless mesh network standard with interoperability. With the implementation of the standard, Wi-SUN alliance was established in 2012. Currently, the alliance has more than 250 members worldwide, including Cisco, ARM, Texas Instruments and Itron, etc. Over the past two years, the Wi-SUN standard has matured, and hundreds of millions of Wi-SUN enabled devices have been deployed worldwide. It is widely used in public utilities and smart city facilities due to its feature of enabling smart meters, smart street lights and other devices to be connected to a public network. Wi-SUN technology is an open specification based on IEEE 802.15.4g, IEEE 802 and IETF IPv6 standard protocols. Wi-SUN FAN is a mesh network protocol that support self organizing and self-healing functions. Each device in the network can communicate with its neighbors, and signals can be transmit to each node in the mesh, making very long range hops in between. Wi-SUN features long distance transmission, security, high scalability, interoperability, easy deployment, mesh network, as well as low power consumption (the battery life of Wi-SUN modules has a chance to It can be used for ten years). It is widely used in smart meters and family intelligent energy management (HEMS) controllers for communication, and is also conducive to building a wide-area large-scale internet of things. The Wi-SUN standard mainly consists of two sub-specifications, namely FAN and HAN. ...

The traditional way of personnel clock-in is to use fingerprints. By registering personal fingerprints in advance, press the fingerprints on the fingerprint attendance machine to confirm the punch-in of personnel on duty. However, the fingerprint attendance machine has the problems of low efficiency, high cleanliness requirement of fingerprints, and the possibility of punch-in failure. Especially at the special moment when the novel coronavirus is raging, people should try to minimize contact between people, and extra attention should be paid to disinfection and avoiding cross-infection of items that are in public touch. For office workers, they need to touch the fingerprint attendance machine during on and off duty. It is difficult to avoid the potential risk of cross-infection. After all, at workplaces, the one who comes into contact with the most people every day, except for door handles, is the fingerprint attendance machine. So, how to realize the attendance of employees in this special period? In the face of complex personnel contact, the best way to avoid cross-infection is contactless clock-in. At this time, Beacon attendance punch-in has become a good alternative. RF-star launched the smart Beacon work attendance solution, using a contactless attendance system to help employees complete punch-in through mobile phones and assist companies to avoid the risk of cross-infection. As long as the mobile phone turns on Bluetooth and the personnel pass by the work attendance device, the personnel identification and his attendance can be realized. Help company managers get rid of various inefficient attendance management methods such as fingerprint attendance, USB flash disk copying attendance data and signature attendance confirmation. The Bluetooth Attendance solution is based on Beacon technology. Broadcast Beacon signals regularly through the Beacon product RF-B-AR1, RF-B-AR4. The punch-in location binding information is carried in MAC address, UUID, Major, Minor and others in the broadcast packets. The personnel uses a mobile phone with Bluetooth enabled to search for the Beacon signal in the air to confirm the punch-in attendance and location. In the Beacon work attendance system, walk into the office area, directly take out the mobile phone, open the APP and punch in finished. No need to punch in on the attendance machine with fingerprints. The Beacon work attendance solution is flexible and convenient, but it also faces the risk of being cheated to punch in. Here come questions. Can Beacon punch-in solve the problem of entrusted attendance? How to confirm that the employee has arrived at the office? Can Beacon punch-in solve the problem of entrusted attendance? There are many APPs and tools for cheating on attendance on the Internet. Roughly the following methods: 1. Location simulation, cracked by GPS and baseband module 2. Wi-Fi simulation 3. Root or jailbreak the phone 4. Customize the mobile phone, crack from the hardware In addition t...

Looking for a way to measure your oil/water levels without ever opening a storage tank? Our Bluetooth technology enables the level gauge to do this. By building a Bluetooth module into the liquid level gauge, the liquid level gauge can transmit data such as its power level, sensing signal strength, liquid level data information, and alarm information to the terminal device in real-time through the wireless network. Thus you can check your liquid level on your phone at any time and anywhere.

Time zipped by and the bell for the year 2022 is about to ring. At this beautiful moment of bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new, RF-star held the Annual Banquet for 2021 at Chengdu where all staff gathered together to celebrate the achievements made in 2021 and expect a bright outlook for 2022. In the past year of 2021, RF-star has made numerous achievements and continues to develop in the IoT industry, which enables itself to be more professional and creative in wireless technology. Before the activities, each department leader made a report on their work for 2021. Then the chairman of the board, Mr.Kang Kai, made an achievement and progress summary of RF-star. He also talked about the company's annual sales achievements, which far exceeded initial expectations and mentioned the outlook for 2022, including several plans such as doubling overall sales in 2021 and expanding and relocating the Chengdu branch. Every success and progress of RF-star will not be possible without the support and help from everyone! After the Chairman’s speech, it comes to the award ceremony. The company awarded more than 20 awards to some outstanding staff, including the most excellent staff in 2021, sales champion award, the most outstanding team award and so on. Many young employees stepped onto the award-winning stage. They show the charming demeanor of RF-star young employees! After the award ceremony, all the staff moved to the hotel and share the banquet. During the banquet, the company held raffle draw activity and fun games, which brings endless rousing cheers and claps, also pushes the activity to its climax. The year 2022 is a new start for RF-star! With the enhancement of overall arrangements of the company, 2022 will be a more rapid development period. “Inclusive all-win and shape the future”. We have confident belief and wonderful wishes to keep close cooperation with all our customers to shape a better future!

The SIG released a new generation of Bluetooth Core Specification 5.2 at CES2020 in Las Vegas, including LE ISOCHRONOUS, LE PWOER CONTROL, LE ATTRIBUTE PROTOCOL. This article talks about LE ISOCHRONOUS. 1. BT 5.2 LE AUDIO Market As we all know, before BT 5.2, Bluetooth audio transmission used the classic Bluetooth A2DP mode for point-to-point data transmission. Now the emergence of Bluetooth LE Audio has broken the monopoly of classic Bluetooth on the audio market. At the 2020 CES, SIG announced that the new Core Specification BT 5.2 supports multi-stream Audio which will enable the transmission of multiple, independent, synchronized audio streams between an audio source device, such as TWS headphones, multi-room audio synchronization. LE Audio will also add Broadcast Audio, enabling an audio source device to broadcast one or more audio streams to an unlimited number of audio sink devices. Broadcast Audio can be widely used in airports, bars, gyms, cinemas, and conference centers and other sites. The emergence of BT 5.2 hits a blow to the Apple TWS, and provides support for multi-channel simultaneous audio transmission. 2. BT 5.2 LE Audio Transmission Principle The Bluetooth LE Isochronous Channels function is a new method of using Bluetooth LE to transfer data between devices. This feature provides a mechanism to ensure synchronization between multiple sink devices receiving data from the same source. The protocol stipulates that each frame of data sent by the Bluetooth transmitter will have a time limit, and the expired data (data that violates the time-bound validity period) that is not transmitted, is discarded. Consequently, the receiving devices receive data that is valid with respect to its age and acceptable latency to ensure the synchronization of data received by multiple slave devices. In order to realize the new function, ISOAL is a new layer in the Bluetooth stack which sits in the controller above the link layer. It provides flexibility in the way that lower layers of the stack and upper layers work together, allowing to provide data stream segmentation and reassembly service. The ISOAL provides segmentation, fragmentation, reassembly, and recombination services for the conversion of the SDUs from the upper layer to the PDUs of the baseband resource manager and vice versa. The ISOAL uses fragmentation/recombination or segmentation/reassembly operations to convert service data units (SDU) into protocol data units (PDU), or vice versa. The ISOAL controller accepts or generates SDUs through the supported 1M and 2M encoding PHYs. The maximum length of each SDU is the Max_SDU. Use the HCI ISO data packet to transmit the SDU to the upper layer or from the lower layer to the air. For the application requirements of LE connection mode and non-connection mode, the BT 5.2 LE AUDIO protocol specifies two data stream transmission framework models. 3. BT 5.2 Synchronous data stream transmission based on LE connection Connection-oriented isochron...

HVAC application comes. How can BLE or Wi-Fi work in HVAC? RF-star BLE solution enables the HVAC to be digitally intelligent. Recent development of IoT and digital technologies created a new way for the HVAC industry to build smart energy management solutions. Such technologies are more oriented to equip the HVAC system with capability of timely and precise perception of fluctuating cooling or heating demand of its serviced space. The system can hence intelligently adjust thecooling or heating outputbased on such perception. Adopting Bluetoothlow energy technologies significantly facilitates HVAC vendors in implementing such new smart solutions.

The IoT technology is constantly updated and iterated, and the indoor positioning technology has also undergone earth-shaking changes. From room-level positioning, decimeter-level positioning to high-precision centimeter positioning, the evolution of technology is always unexpected! Various positioning technologies of indoor positioning solutions appear in turn. Which technology is most suitable for indoor positioning? Let’s take a comprehensive perspective to understand the Bluetooth indoor positioning solution. Overview of Beacon Indoor Positioning Technology There are two Beacon indoor positioning technologies: 1. Passive location: Use the Bluetooth gateway to capture the broadcast data transmitted by the beacon on the person/object. The gateway is deployed and installed in the environment. And the gateway will return the collected beacon data to the server through the network. The server obtains the real-time position coordinates of the beacon through a positioning algorithm based on the coordinates known by the gateway. 2. Active position: Use the APP on a mobile device to get the Beacon broadcast data. The APP will have a positioning algorithm. Based on Beacon broadcast data, we can know the person's location who holds the mobile device. The location and navigation in the room are realized through APP or Applet, which is suitable for shopping malls, parking lots, and hospitals. Features of Beacon indoor positioning technology Compared with Wi-Fi positioning technology, Beacon technology suffers less environmental interference. Beacon product is based on the battery power supply. With the advantages of Bluetooth low energy consumption, long service life, small size, and the high penetration rate of Beacon devices, Bluetooth positioning is the most commonly used technology in indoor positioning technology. In daily life, smartphones and smart speakers support Bluetooth. The popularity and mass use of Bluetooth makes Bluetooth chips at a low price. And the BLE price is lower than traditional UWB/RFID solutions. How does Bluetooth realize indoor positioning? The Bluetooth working frequency is 2400 MHz ~ 2483.5 MHz. When Bluetooth initiates a broadcast, in addition to its own MAC address, the strength of the Bluetooth signal will also be broadcasted, namely RSSI information. The RSSI reflects the signal strength of the broadcast data packet. According to the RSSI, when the Bluetooth receiver is closer to the transmitter, the signal strength is stronger, on the contrary, will be weaker. The relationship between the signal strength and the distance from the transmitter can be found through the transformation of signal strength. By deploying a Bluetooth transmitter in the room, namely a beacon, the Bluetooth receiver can determine its indoor location after receiving the RSSI signal broadcasted by the transmitter. This positioning method is called active positioning, and the positioning accuracy is 3 meters to 4 meters. Through a reasonable algorith...

In recent years, thanks to the rapid development of new technologies such as IoT communication technology and artificial intelligence, domestic smart home products have passed through the three stages of automation, intelligence and IoT, and entered the era of whole-house intelligence. Giants from the communications, Internet, home appliances, home furnishing, real estate and other industries have released smart home strategies and laid out product ecology. The market competition is extremely fierce. In June 2021, the research institute IDC released the "Quarterly Tracking Report on China's Smart Home Device Market." The report shows that in the first quarter of 2021, China’s smart home device market shipped 46.99 million units, a year-on-year growth of 27.7%. In the smart home market, Apple entered the market earlier with the HomeKit platform, established a more mature ecology, and became the leading player in the smart home market. Relying on the iOS system to further increase the stickiness of Apple users, the HomeKit smart home platform has built a complete ecosystem of whole house intelligence through centralized management and intelligent operation. 1. HomeKit builds Apple fans smart home ecology Apple released HomeKit, a smart home platform, in 2014. In 2015, the first batch of HomeKit smart home products were released, which can control lighting, indoor temperature and other electrical appliances through iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Since Apple itself does not produce HomeKit hardware, HomeKit is just a certification protocol, so manufacturers are gradually supporting the HomeKit protocol. Since the release of iOS 10, people can use the "Home" APP added to the iOS system to manage and control smart home devices that support the HomeKit framework. 1.1. "Home" centralized management HomeKit supports centralized management of devices on the "Home" APP, and no other APP is required for each smart device. However, judging from the products released on the market that support the HomeKit protocol, each product still has its own APP launched by the manufacturer to increase customer retention. The settings in the supporting APP are usually more abundant than the functions in the Home APP. For example, Aqara's smart sockets, detailed power consumption curves and statistics can be seen in the original APP. The "Home" APP covers four parts: accessories, scenes, rooms, and automation. (1) The concept of an accessory is well understood, which means that a single smart device is added to the APP. (2) Scene refers to the unified state of multiple devices into corresponding states at a certain moment. For example, the lunch break scene will contain closed curtains and closed lights. (3) The rooms are classified according to space to facilitate the unified management of multiple devices. (4) Automation is to set some conditions to trigger automatic execution of commands. Automation can actually be understood as a scene triggered by a specific condition, su...

What Is Automotive Battery Management System(BMS)? With the recent implementation of government regulations aimed at reducing CO2 emissions to combat climate change, the global electric vehicle industry is expected to witness significant growth in the coming years. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, annual electric vehicle shipments worldwide are projected to reach 30 million by 2030, and 60 million by 2040. At the core of an electric vehicle lies its battery pack, which is a complex assembly comprising multiple modules, each consisting of hundreds of battery cells. In total, a battery pack may contain thousands of cells. The Battery Management System (BMS) serves as the "brain" of an electric vehicle's battery pack. It is a vital component of the vehicle responsible for ensuring its safe and efficient operation, with its performance having a significant impact on the EV's driving range and battery life. The primary function of a BMS is to manage the health, performance, and safety of the battery, making it a critical component for the successful operation of an electric vehicle. Various wireless solutions are being considered for the implementation of wireless BMS. While some of them are proprietary and designed specifically for the wireless BMS use case, opting for a standard solution like Bluetooth comes with significant advantages. What Are Advantages of Wireless BMS Embedded Bluetooth Modules? Here are the reasons why Bluetooth LE module is suitable for wireless BMS: 1. High throughput: With a data rate of over one megabit per second, Bluetooth far exceeds the rates offered by many proprietary alternatives. This ability to transfer large amounts of data quickly is especially crucial for BMS, as a significant amount of information must be sent to the central processing unit, which scales with the number of battery modules. In addition, the high data rate of Bluetooth also results in lower latency, which is essential for ensuring the safety of the system. 2. Reliable connectivity: Bluetooth technology is known for its ability to provide reliable data transmission even in noisy environments. This makes it a suitable option for wireless BMS, which typically involves several battery modules communicating with a central unit using Bluetooth technology. 3. Secured Connection: In addition to its other advantages, Bluetooth technology provides a highly secured connection for wireless BMS. This is achieved through encryption and authentication mechanisms that prevent unauthorized access, ensuring the safety of the vehicle and its occupants. 4. Low-power consumption: Bluetooth technology, specifically Bluetooth LE, is known for its low-power consumption, making it an ideal wireless communication protocol for BMS. Additionally, when using Bluetooth LE with PAwR (Passive Advertisement with Reply), the central unit periodically sends advertising packets, and observers only listen during these advertising events and can go to sleep in between....