RTLS Studio 2.0 Released!

Manual deployment of anchors causes delays in setting up the RTLS and the anchors can be easily interchanged. The Anchor Auto-Deployment dramatically speeds up the system’s set up. The distances between anchors are automatically measured using TWR during their initialization. These distances are then used to calculate the rough position of each anchor in relation to others. Deployment of anchors is simplified by moving, rotating and flipping this model and applying it to an area plan. This feature is in its beta phase.

Adding new users and maintaining permissions for them doesn’t have to be labor-intensive, complicated and error-prone. With the new RTLS Studio Roles and Permissions feature, you can quickly provide role-based control over the features accessible to your users.

Roles are objects that define authorization options for users, i.e., which actions they can perform within the RTLS Studio administration interface. Roles provide an interface that maps permissions to users in a way that can easily be reused.

Role-based access controls also represent an extra layer of security to help you enforce company security policies by granting only the amount of access to users that they need to perform their jobs and giving you a complete overview into which permissions are in use, greatly reducing the chances of producing outlier users with unauthorized levels of access.

RTLS Studio offers three ready-to-use standard roles of “RTLS Admin”, “Supervisor” and “Observer” allowing the granting of the right level of system access to many users at the same time, virtually eliminating the errors that can happen when permissions are set individually. Custom roles can be easily added and later updated to support countless permission combinations, extending your range of granular control.

End-to-end encryption is the key to security as it provides core security guarantees and keeps out any other party that might try to interfere or break the encryption except for the actual entities directly engaged in communication.   

With RTLS Studio 2.0, communication between users, server and third-party software is encrypted with HTTPS (Web Content, REST) and WSS (WebSockets), ensuring data is transferred securely between the endpoints.

RTLS Studio 2.0 has got a complete new look and feel to its user interface. Its UI is now not only unified, modern, and clean, but has also been designed to be user-centric and tablet-first.

All applications, as well as notifications throughout the system, are now accessible at a single click and smoothly switched to from any of the applications currently in use.

The menu of every application has been unified and moved to the left panel, which is expandable upon mouse hover making the navigation quicker and saving the space needed for your data and its visualization. New iconography has been introduced, with pictograms showcased in their simplest form for prompt recognition on various screen sizes and easy identification (yes, floppy disks are rare to see, but it’s still the most recognizable icon for the “save” action).

To get an immediate overview and better control of your system’s condition, we have added a status bar to the RTLS Manager application that displays diagnostic information such as the overall network status, any misconfiguration between anchors and other anchor-related issues.

Updating the system by accessing the server’s filesystem and terminal is time intensive. Now, updating the full system can be done using the single-click online update application from within the RTLS Studio interface.  As the server machines are usually not connected to the Internet, updates are performed by providing an update package that can be downloaded from the Sewio Partner Portal.

Complex projects require the integration of Sewio with various technologies and hardware. Thanks to the RTLS.io feature – now native to RTLS Studio – providing a link between the virtual geo-zones in Sewio and the end-point system has never been easier. A user can easily set up custom events for each metric, tag(s) and zones that will behave as triggers for the user-created actions.

A fundamental use case is setting up a “warning” and “no-go” zone around a robotic machine. If the person enters the warning zone, a light and an acoustic alarm will notify them, while going closer to the machine – entering the “no-go” zone – will turn off the machine to prevent injuries. The RTLS.io application allows you to integrate as many electronic devices as you need. The RTLS Studio 2.0 supports seven Advantech IoT Ethernet modules. 

The Profiler, a tool for further optimization of the deployment, has been part of RTLS Studio for some time now. With the latest version, it has been enhanced by real-time information of the first path for every anchor used in the calculation, which, in combination with RSSI, helps to identify bounced signals, if there are any. Therefore, the critical areas of the positioning system are easily detected and can be fine-tuned to unrivaled precision.

RTLS Studio 2.0’s backend has been updated to PHP version 7.2 which brings along increased speed and security. Since the long-term support of Ubuntu 14.04 is coming to its sunset the Ubuntu 18.04 stable version support has been added.