News (Page 5)

BlueMark Innovations has moved to a new and bigger office location! Our new visit and postal address (after October 1st 2018) is:

BlueMark Innovations BV
Bruggenmorsweg 10
7521ZV Enschede
the Netherlands

GL.iNet is a leading manufacturer for WiFi routers with openWRT pre-installed. It means that out of the box GL.iNet routers run openWRT. BlueMark Zero firmware is our solution to detect WiFi and Bluetooth BLE devices and runs on openWRT devices. It also means that BlueMark Zero is supported by these devices out of the box. With a few steps you can turn your GL.iNet device(*) into a device that detect WiFi and/or Bluetooth devices. BlueMark Zero supports the full range of GL.iNet routers.

(*) We support all openWRT devices that have a WiFi driver with a so-called monitor mode. If you are unsure if you device is supported, please contact us.

Install BlueMark Zero

Installing BlueMark Zero is easy.

1. Setup your GL.iNet device (set up password, timezone)
2. Login to the GL.iNet device by SSH (e.g. ssh root@192.168.8.1)
3. Retrieve the installation scrip and execute itt, enter this commands.
   1. cd /tmp; wget http://download.bluemark.io:12389/init/install.sh
   2. sh install.sh
4. The installation script will ask two questions, enter a sensor ID and a software license. The sensorID is a number to identify the sensor. For instance if you enter 100, all collected data will be assigned to sensor with sensorID 100. It is wise to choose sensor IDs unique. So you won’t have project with the same sensor IDs. The other questions is to enter a software license. This license is needed to unlock the firmware.  Once installed the firmware will check roughly every 4 hours if the license is valid and if successful will unlock the firmware. Licenses can be generated at our license portal.
5. After (automatic) rebooting your GL.iNet router will start sensing!
6. Check the BlueMark detection settings at http://192.168.8.1/cgi-bin/bluemark/index (The regular URL http://192.168.8.1/bluemark does not work due to the GL.iNet firmware.)
7. The BlueMark firmware supports different ways of outputting data. The firmware can act as TCP server and output the data as JSON or XML objects. The default output mode is to write the detected devices to SQL text strings. Periodically those files are compressed and sent to the server via SCP communication. To set this mode up, a SSH key has to be generated at the sensor. Its public key is needed at the server to authorise uploads
   1. By default the sensor has a demo SSH key installed, it allows to upload data to our demo server.
   2. At the sensor perform this command to generate a unique key: dropbearkey -t rsa -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa 
   3. Use the public key at the server to allow the sensor to upload data. It is advised to use one key per project for security reasons.
8. For more information please visit our wiki. (Ask our team for a login code.)

In the latest firmware BlueMark Innovations have launched support for Bluetooth detection. All BlueMark sensors including BlueMark zero support this new feature by upgrading the firmware and adding a Bluetooth USB dongle. Bluetooth detection is a great add-on to WiFi analytics or can run stand-alone.

Bluetooth Classic detection is important for (motorized) traffic applications. Although popular smartphones like Android and iOS can’t be detected, most car kits or GPS navigation can be sensed. Bluetooth Classic is an active sensing method, meaning that the sensor will transmit packets to ask for nearby Bluetooth devices. As WiFi uses the same frequency, there may be some performance degradation in WiFi sensing.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is used mostly to set up a wireless connection between smartphone and accessory like wireless earphones, smartwatch. Detection of BLE devices is different compared to Bluetooth Classic and is completely passive. Passive means that the detection only listens for incoming BLE packets similar to WiFi sensing. Most BLE devices transmit every second or more a packet. Besides smartphone accessories, also newer car kits have BLE support and can be detected.

The final application is the detection of Apple iBeacons (and Google Eddystone beacons). An iBeacon is a special kind of BLE device. Although iBeacons are mostly fixed installations e.g. for instance in a shop, it allows asset tracking. Currently there are a lot of cost-effective battery powered iBeacons available in different form factor such as tags, credit cards. Provide your visitors iBeacons or attach them to your assets to allow tracking.

BlueMark Innovations introduces the BlueMark zero; a software license to run BlueMark firmware on your own hardware.

In some applications, you just want to use your own hardware instead of a regular BlueMark sensor. For these applications the BlueMark zero is introduced. The BlueMark zero is  basically firmware that runs on most openWRT devices. We provide an install script to install the software. During the installation you also need to provide a serial number/license. Once installed the firmware will check roughly every 4 hours if the license is valid and if successful will unlock the firmware.

Licenses can be generated by customers at our license portal. In this portal you can choose subscription of 1 month, 1 year or 3 years.

At this moment the following platforms are supported:

• Atheros AR71xx
• Mediatek MT7620
• Ralink RT305x
• Broadcom brcm63xx
• MikroTik RB951Ui-2HnD router
• Raspberry Pi
• x86

During the TT festival June 22 to 26th in Assen the new flagship BlueMark bm2000 sensor has been launched. The TT festival is a multi day music event in the inner city of Assen organized parallel with the TT GP motorcycle races. Last year 150 000 people visited the event. The new sensor has improvements over the BlueMark 1000 sensors, such as lower power consumption which is ideal for battery-powered operation. Also the new flagship sensor has a power sensor the measure the current power consumption and battery level.  Moreover, the on-board I2C interface allows to add other types of  sensors such as sound, temperature etc. which is ideal for smart city applications.

During the festival 40x BlueMark bm2000 have been deployed to measure crowd movements in the inner city of Assen. The ICT institute CTIT of University of Twente will analyze the data. In total more than 75 million raw data points have been collected during this period.

Innofest – Follow the crowd

Also during the event a meeting was organized between crowd professionals by Innofest. BlueMark was one of the key note speakers and gave a presentation about the results of last year. Also an interview was given to RTV Drenthe which can be found here:

The interview can be watched here:

http://www.rtvdrenthe.nl/nieuws/110524/Experts-kijken-naar-doorstroom-mensenmassa-tijdens-TT-evenementen

This year the annual privacySIG meeting was hosted by BlueMark in Enschede. The latest insights about privacy and WiFi analytics were discussed. Also the members attended a meeting with professor dr. ir. Maarten van Steen of the nearby University of Twente. Professor van Steen is scientific director of the ICT institute CTIT and is involved into research about WiFi analytics; especially privacy issues. This is conducted in the Living Smart Campus project.

Roel Schiphorst of BlueMark Innovations has given an interview in the TV program RT Z Toekomstmakers  about retail and big data. The interview can be viewed here:

http://www.rtlz.nl/tech/deze-week-toekomstmakers-big-data-de-winkel

BlueMark has contributed in a consortium of DAT.mobility and Connection Systems to monitor real-time visitors flows during SAIL Amsterdam 2015. Client was the AMS institute – Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions
Since its first edition in 1975, SAIL Amsterdam has grown to become the largest public event in the Netherlands and the largest free nautical event in the world. Every five years, in excess of 600 ships navigate to Amsterdam. More than 2 million visitors have attended the event.

More information can be found here (in Dutch):

http://www.goudappel.nl/actueel/2015/08/21/sail-view-dat/

We are proud to announce that we have received the ePrivacy seal for our platform! It complies fully with the strict European laws on privacy.

The ePrivacyseal is awarded to online and mobile products following a technical and legal review. The seal of approval confirms compliance with ePrivacyseal’s criteria catalog, which complies with German and European data protection laws.

Our seal can be viewed here:

ePrivacy seal BlueMark Innovations