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Simon Ford
Bluetooth and RFID will not just co-exist, but co-operate: notes from RAIN in Action 2026
Maya Ahluwalia: Oct 6, 2026, 10:23:13 AM
The IN100 NanoBeacon is a Bluetooth Low Energy transmit-only chip suitable for building low-cost active RFID and wireless sensor beacon applications.
The InPlay NanoBeacon is a Bluetooth Transmitter frontend coupled with FSM allowing it to deliver a very low-cost solution that can act as a basic Bluetooth Beacon.
Although it can not make connections, it can be configured as a Basic Beacon using Blecon's next generation beacon format to be detected by Blecon Agent and the Blecon Network.
The main features are the chip are:
- Bluetooth 5.3 compliant advertising payloads
- Optional I/O for interfacing with sensors and host MCU
- Operating voltage range of 1.1V~3.6V and low power operation
- Additional features like authentication and encryption features
The parts are already generally available now and come in under $0.50 @ 1k units:
And a development kit is available that can be powered and programmed via USB:
- IN100 Development Kit (Digikey)
It can be configured to be spotted by the Blecon Network using the NanoBeacon Configuration Tool and an appropriate beacon format - here it is in action using the development kit:
If you'd like to try the IN100 NanoBeacon with Blecon, you can request access here:
For devices supporting more advanced Smart Beacon functionality, take a look at the Blecon Tags page.
Cold chain monitoring: you can't see a broken cold chain by looking at the box
Maya Ahluwalia: Jul 20, 2026, 2:57:55 PM
A temperature failure does not look like anything. A pallet of chilled food that spent an afternoon too warm arrives looking exactly like one that...
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Returnable transport item tracking: the three costs hiding in one line item
Maya Ahluwalia: Jul 10, 2026, 11:41:42 AM
Somewhere in most operations budgets there is a figure that gets renewed every year without much argument. It might be called replacement stock,...