Designing and testing of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) system for small wooden boat identification and e-certification

Abstract

This paper presented the implementation of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices implanted on 7 small wooden boats. The BLE implantation is aimed at boat identification and certification. We use four parameters to measure the performance of BLE signal strength, e.g., solar panel usage (with/without solar panel usage), weather effect (sunny/rain), sea wave form (shallow/tidal waters), and distance. The specification of BLE and boat identification system is also presented. From the experiment, we found that BLE signal strength performance is impacted by four parameters including its combined parameters: (a) the highest hour of the detected signal is generated when the boats are connected to the solar panel; (b) the boats transmitting the signal in sunny weather; (c) the boats are in shallow water sea wave; (d) the boats are in sunny weather and connected to solar panel will have a detectable distance for up to 30 m compared to without solar panel connection, it will only have a detectable distance for up to 15 m. It is suggested for future recommendations to expand this study with the newest BLE version and better solar panel equipment to get higher signal strength performance.