Originally published at: Where's my (Bluetooth) drill? - The Golioth Developer Blog
Industrial job sites are full of expensive tools, some of which wander off. We looked at this situation when we had a guest post about static asset tracking using Bluetooth. That was mostly looking at the RSSI of devices talking to a gateway and didn’t have any insight into the tool use. Today we’re going to introduce a more integrated version that talks to devices and also leans heavily into Golioth’s new Bluetooth-to-Cloud connectivity: we’ll have a device record on the cloud that shows power draw and the physical location of the device, based on which gateway it’s connected to. Let’s dive in. Drill setup First off, we should note that this is a prototype approximating many products already on the market. Toolmakers have a range of similar systems that are vertically integrated into their ecosystems: Dewalt Tool Connect Milwaukee OneKey Ultimately there are tons of teams that are out there building similar capabilities over and over…but it takes a lot of people to implement. For a smaller team, it would require spinning up hardware, firmware, and cloud infrastructure to make it happen, before any of the manufacturing takes place. Sounds like a good candidate for Golioth’s IoT infrastructure. The hardware is…very much a prototype! I purchased an off-the-shelf battery compartment (made for DIY battery replacements, YMMV) and put my electronics in there. Then I found a 3D printed mount for the battery so it can plug into the bottom, using my custom hardware as a pass-through to tap into B+/B-. Finally, I hard wired a 10K resistor from the Thermistor blade to B+ in order to simulate temperature monitoring. Without temperature monitoring, only simple tools like LED flashlights would…
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