Ask Slashdot: Wireless Proximity Detection? 101
New submitter Cinnamon Whirl writes "As a chemist, I work in a both lab and office enviroments, and need access to data in both, without causing undue clutter in either. My company has recently purchased two Win7 tablets for trial usage with electronic lab notebooks, propietry software, SAP, email etc. These are also useful for sharing in meetings, etc. As part of this project, I have been wondering whether we can use these tablets to detect other devices by proximity. Examples could include finding the nearest printer or monitor or, perhaps trickier, could two roaming devices find each other? Although lab technology is rarely cutting edge, I can see a day when all our sensors and probes will broadcast data (wireless thermocouples are already available), and positioning information will become much more important. What technologies exist to do this? How accurate can the detection be?"
Bluetooth 4.0 is designed for this sort of thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
See the Wikipedia entry on Bluetooth. Listed in the use cases for 4.0 (otherwise known as Bluetooth low energy):
"Mobile phones, gaming, PCs, watches, sports and fitness, healthcare, security & proximity, automotive, home electronics, automation, Industrial, etc."
Wifi (Score:0, Interesting)
If Wifi damages sperm quality, is it wise to use it heavily in a lab with highly sensitive experiments going on?
Questionable usefulness (Score:5, Interesting)
In what way is your tablet making wireless use of a monitor? Are you talking about a computer workstation, or just a standalone monitor?
I can't see ad-hoc networking being very useful for instrumentation. I would think you'd want sure fire, dedicated, reliable data capture and not random hodge-podge as far as that goes. For example, an instrument in the lab finds Tablet A and dumps its cached data to that tablet. The user of Tablet A promptly leaves the building and the data is now stuck on his device which is out of range. Worse, Tablet A is then dropped in a stream of molten lava in the field, and the data from that instrument is lost for good.
I think you need to better define exactly what you're even wanting proximity detection for in the first place - specifically, when two devices find one another, what is the point? Printers are one of the few things that makes some sense for proximity, but even in that case, how many printers are you talking about that it is too tedious to pick the desired printer from a list? What if you don't want to print to the closest printer, but the one nearest your office? Or the printer back at the office while you're out in the field? I would think printers in a lab would be part of the infrastructure, and not an ad-hoc wifi network. Further, you're usually better off with your tablet connecting to a WAP and accessing the LAN, instead of trying to wirelessly connect to individual devices like printers directly. In that case the whole concept of proximity is out the window unless your talking about PAN (bluetooth) type peripherals like keyboards and mice.
WAPs are usually strategically located for maximum wireless coverage, whereas things like printers and instruments are situated in entirely different locations where they are easy to reach (and thus suboptimal from a wireless perspective). Proximity could actually be a bad thing - it is really just a restriction. Wouldn't you want to be able to access a specific instrument whether or not you were in direct wireless range of that device?
Sometimes the old ways are still the best (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bluetooth 4.0 is designed for this sort of thin (Score:5, Interesting)
I used a similar Bluetooth setup in my old house with my phone system.
My VoIP setup had multiple outside lines (up to 12, fees were for usage), and numerous internal extensions.
I tossed some scripts together for my computers around the house to watch for the bluetooth signal from my cell phone, and routed the call depending on that data.
If my cell phone was in my kitchen, calls to my main # got redirected to the extension in the kitchen.
If my cell was in the bedroom, calls got routed to that extension instead.
If my cell was no where to be seen in the house, calls to my main # were forwarded to my cell phone number, under the assumption I was not in the house.
This saved me from using my cell phone battery while inside, but when I was out calls routed to me none the less with no configuration changes, or having to remember to flip some switch when leaving and returning.
It was pretty neat to have the phone in the family room ring once (as I was already walking upstairs) and have the ring "follow" me from there to the kitchen extension and finally to my bedroom before answering.
Behind the scenes it was a mess of asterisk configs/scripts, shell scripts, and some wrapped TCL executable for the windows machines.
But it was fairly straight forward work, not too difficult. This should be very doable as long as one has a little bit of programming (or really even just scripting) experience to glue all the bits and pieces together.
As somebody who has used... (Score:4, Interesting)
...these sorts of technologies in the labs: wireless is often overrated unless you really need it.
It makes sense for your tablet. It doesn't make so much sense for that balance that needs to be leveled and calibrated anytime you shift it an inch anyway. Just use reliable wired connections for these sorts of things.
That doesn't mean hooking up a wire to your tablet. If the balance is wired to a network, and your tablet is wirelessly connected to a network, then they are already connected.
And, for any kind of serious data collection you don't want the instrument directly talking to a tablet anyway. The instrument should be talking to a server somewhere that is always running and capturing data, and then your tablet can connect to that server when it needs data. Oh, and if you're at home you can connect to it as well that way.
I can't tell you how many installations I've seen where some scientist got some money to have some consultants set up some kind of fancy data acquisition system in their lab. Inevitably it stores all its data on some PC that has no backups of any kind sitting in the lab. Of course, chances are the reason that they did it that way was that they're used to people in corporate IT just impeding progress, so they work around them. The right solution of course is cooperation - let the consultants handle their software and instruments, and have corporate IT provide the secured servers that they store data on. If your IT department is really sharp maybe they can actually help you work through what kinds of data is being collected where and help get it properly connected so that you aren't drowning in excel spreadsheets on flash drives.
However, all of this is a pipe dream. Small companies often don't have the resources to do something like this right, and big companies usually have managers who are too interested in their own empires to exhibit the kind of cooperation that I describe here. So, everybody micro-optimizes their piece of the puzzle and crosses their finger that there isn't a fire.