After just landing a few hours before, I made my way to the Sands Expo Center with my wife to visit the CTIA show floor for the last two hours before it closed.
I wasn’t really expecting to find much with just a few hours, but after bumping into a handful of friends and experiencing Samsung’s virtual reality headset, I started to look for new and exciting products.
The main attraction that I saw, was the Cisco hyper location module. It’s a device that attaches to an existing 3700 series access point and location module, that contains 32 different antennas located around the AP as an array. This halo configuration provides 32 different ways that the access point can hear a device in any given location. The key benefit here is hyper location: giving you the ability to track a device from 1 to 3 m, as opposed to 3 to 5 m which is about the industry standard right now. It does this by listening in 32 different directions and using the onboard radio to process this information. In addition, the location module which contains a BLE radio gives you the ability to support another level of LBS services from Cisco.
One of the things that I thought was really cool about this was that it snapped onto an existing 3700 series chassis, by removing two blank plates on the underside of the device. It does not affect the mounting and barely affects the overall weight of the device, still giving you the ability to mount this on drop ceiling beams, walls, or any other location.
There was no software demonstration on the specific use cases of this, but you can let your mind wander as to what you can do. When asked about how many devices to deploy in order to get the perfect amount of tracking, a standard three device configuration would work, but you could still get some pretty decent information off of a single device with an array attached.
Overall the design is pretty sleek and even features and arrow to make sure that you know where 0° is located on the array. It’s naps together pretty seamlessly and doesn’t require tools or anything more than two thumbscrews to get it attached. I look forward to learning more about this device and seeing some real world use cases of it at wireless field day 8, or I was told it will be featured 🙂
I would write more about this, however I left my laptop charger at home like a true amateur blogger, so I’m off to Best Buy to find the best replacement I can 🙂
More tomorrow from CTIA 2015 in Las Vegas!
Hi Drew,Can this operate stand-alone? Or does it need additional CISCO hardware to run it? Is there an API to query the location data?