Electronically Talking Airfirls

There is a special time interval during the visit of the pub, where crazy ideas are coming. One of them was realised finally.

We are in the age of Internet of Things, the world communicate, transfer every information which one can imagine ... Why our beloved airgirls has to stay silent?  No! It would be perfect to make them interactive. Be able to send them some word or sentence and get some reply. Take some information about airgirl or simply know that she is present and is ok. Touch her in virtual world and look forward to touch her in reality.

Android phone with iTag application running. Some of my airgirls added by their own iTag.

My girls are quipped with small cheap tool called iTag. There is a screenshot of Android application, which can do a basic contact with them. They reply regardless their current state - inflated, deflated, stored in box. The communication works in one room and next at the wall. Next we use our experimental Raspberry Pi station and extend this conversation over internet. I look forward to day, when I will see my girls from a distant trip.
 

The iTag in comparison with a small safety pin The small hole near the big hole is the LED.

 It looks nice, but after few practical tests, there were problems found:

• The battery life time is not a fraction of year (how sellers said), but it is only 4 days, when a iTag is not connected to an application. In that state, it is in a beacon mode, a blue LED flashing in approx. 1 second interval and the beacon message is sent in the same rate. The battery life time when the iTag is connected was not tested, because it is hard to make it connected permanently. The similar period is expected.

• The IP addresses of iTags differs in last 16 bits only. When you need iTags for parallel use, select them carefully, because you can buy iTags with the same IP address. (I have them also.) The IP address format is FF-FF-00-00-xx-yy, when xx and yy differs.
• The connection is very unstable. You often loss connection with your iTag and it is not reconnected automatically. I recommend you to disable sound alarm both on the application side and on the iTag side, or you will be bothered with alarms permanently.
• The connection is difficult sometimes. I don't know the reason, but sometimes iTags won't to connect.
• There are few Android applications ready for iTag connection and watch up. None of them working perfectly, they are full of bugs and not reilable. Apparently any Android application for iTags is not intended for practical use. The Tiny Tracking worked best, but with also with mistakes.

Finally, I looked inside the iTag and found, that it is based on very nice chip BK3431 from BEKEN company and small count of passive components. The chip is an ARM processor with a BlueTooth LE radio interface. When we could modify the firmware inside, it could do many interesting things, like temperature, humidity or pressure measurement, movement registration, etc. But the ARM is unknown and who know if any development tools are available for it. Note that it contains a temperature sensor ready on chip.

The top side of the board inside iTag. You see the BK3431 chip, a crystal, a button and a beeper.

The bottom side of the iTag. A battery contact and a programming interface.

Regardless problems listed above, I believe in using iTags in future. It is possible to find and connect them via Linux BlueTooth tools like hcitool. Next step will be writing my own Linux script which will find iTags and which will maintain reliable contact with them.