AmbiCon

AmbiCon is Ambimat Electronics’ Bluetooth Low Energy proximity line — hardware that announces itself to nearby phones so an application can react to where someone is, rather than waiting to be opened. Ambimat’s beacon solution was FCC certified in 2014.

AmbiCon Bluetooth beacon circuit board showing the coin cell holder, screw terminal and surface-mount components

Where AmbiCon is used

  • Retail environments running proximity marketing and customer engagement
  • Exhibitions and venues, where the useful signal is footfall, dwell time and zone entry
  • Indoor geolocation and location-based services
  • Targeted messaging to a phone that is already in the visitor’s pocket
  • Asset tracking, by fixing the beacon to the asset and using phones as the receivers

Products in this family

AmbiCon Bluetooth Beacon

Transmits user-defined data over Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 at a configurable interval. Any BLE-capable receiver running a suitable application can pick it up, and because detection happens in the background the application does not need to be open.

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Two deployment patterns

Fix the beacon in the environment and you are tracking people: footfall, dwell, zone entry. Fix it to the asset and use phones as the receivers and you are tracking equipment instead. The same hardware does both; what changes is where you mount it and what the application does with the advertisement.

Choosing a proximity approach

Which proximity technology fits is mostly a question of range, power and who owns the receiver. BLE beacons are the right answer when the receiver is a phone somebody already carries and the useful distance is tens of feet. They are the wrong answer when you need metre-level accuracy, when there is no application on the receiving side, or when the tag has to run for years on a coin cell. Ambimat can work through those trade-offs alongside the rest of the connectivity stack.

Platform compatibility

The AmbiCon beacon was originally specified against iOS 6 and later and Android 4.3 and later, which were the minimum versions supporting Bluetooth Low Energy at the time of certification. Those figures describe the original platform specification and are not a statement of currently recommended platform support — for a present-day deployment, confirm the target OS versions with us as part of scoping.

Engineering and customisation

AmbiCon is a complete hardware-to-software stack made in India, so the advertisement payload, transmit interval, enclosure and power arrangement can follow the deployment. It works with retail applications and analytics platforms through standard SDK and API patterns, and where a customer already has an application, the beacon side is usually the smaller part of the work.

Discuss an AmbiCon deployment