Blecon Blog

InPlay IN100 NanoBeacon in action

Written by Simon Ford | Feb 25, 2023 10:19:14 PM

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 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:


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 with Blecon, you can request access here:

For full Blecon functionality, take a look at the MCU-based integrations.