InPlay IN100 NanoBeacon in action

The IN100 NanoBeacon is a new Bluetooth Low Energy 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 Bluetooth Beacon.

Although it can not make connections, it can be configured to transmit advertising packets that can be detected by Blecon Hotspots 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:

• IN100-D1 (Digikey) - 2.5x2.5mm 8-WDFN 
• IN100-Q1 (Digikey) - 3.0x3.0mm 18-WQFN

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 - here it is in action using the development kit:

If you'd like to try the IN100 NanoBeacon and Blecon, you can get access here:

• https://www.blecon.net/inplay-nanobeacon

In the future, we'll be pushing the limits of the data and security aspects of the chip too...