Cinamin: A Perpetual and Nearly Invisible BLE Beacon

Bluetooth Low Energy beacons have immense potential to provide rich contextual information to smartphone applications and people by bridging the physical and digital worlds. Beacons perform the simple operation of periodically chirping URLs, locations, and other pointers, however, today’s beacons use relatively large and battery powered implementations. To truly make these beacons pervasive, they will need to be smaller, self-powered, and, ideally, invisible. To facilitate this, we propose the Cinamin beacon design that exploits the powerful but simple primitive of periodic packet broadcast to replace the volume-defining battery with an energy-harvesting power supply and achieve a beacon in under 100 mm3. This design, however, raises new issues relevant to energy-harvesting and challenges with pursuing miniaturization.