How to Purchase a White Label BLE Beacon from an ODM and Connect It to Hubble

For most Hubble beacons today, someone built firmware with the Hubble SDK and a specific device key and manually flashed a development board. While this process works for initial testing, it’s too cumbersome for deploying a fleet of Hubble devices at scale.

Working with an original design manufacturer (ODM) makes deploying a production fleet of Hubble beacons simple. In this guide, we’ll walk through my process of working with Minew to configure multiple Hubble devices and have them shipped directly to your door.

Why Work with an ODM

Say your business ships temperature-sensitive medicine to clinics worldwide, and you need to make sure your medicine stays cold throughout shipment. You could easily verify all shipments if each one had a Hubble beacon. If your business ships thousands of cartons every month, however, setting up every beacon by hand at your desk, as you would with a development kit, is unfeasible.

That’s where an ODM comes in. An ODM designs and builds a product, like a white-label Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon, then sells it to you to brand and use as your own. An ODM that already works with Hubble handles the hardware, the Hubble firmware, the radio certifications, and production at scale. All you need to do is give them a unique device key for each beacon.

The Hubble network uses the device key to authenticate and identify each beacon. When working with an ODM, you must first register all keys in your Hubble account. Then you send them to the ODM, which loads the keys into your beacons. Because the keys are already associated with your Hubble account, as soon as the ODM powers on your beacons, you can track them from the factory to your front door.

For background on manufacturer types, see our previous guide on OEM vs CEM vs ODM vs EMS. How to Get a Custom BLE Beacon Built and Shipped Without Designing Your Own Hardware covers vendor selection in depth. This guide assumes you have already chosen your vendor.

Selecting Minew Devices

For this guide, Hubble introduced me to Minew, one of their ODM partners, which supplied the E9 and MTB06 BLE beacons.

The E9 is built like a conventional beacon. It contains a Nordic nRF52 chip with BLE 5.0 and comes in an IP67 waterproof, dustproof plastic case. With its screw holes on the case, the E9 can be attached to many types of equipment for asset tracking in warehouses and logistics.

The MTB06 is a 1.2 mm-thin beacon that looks and works like a standard shipping label. Warehouses can print shipping information directly onto the MTB06, stick it on a package, and continuously track the shipment’s location.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two beacon types:

Registering Device Keys

The first step in working with Minew was to register every device on my Hubble account. I created a device key for each beacon on the Hubble dashboard with Add a Device > I just need a Device Key.

Next, I set the encryption method and counter sources for each device. Each beacon type needed its own settings to suit its hardware best.

E9

• Encryption method: AES-256-CTR
• Counter source: UNIX TIME

MTB06

• Encryption method: AES-128-EAX
• Counter source: DEVICE UPTIME
• Rotation period exponent: 15

For the E9, the default settings worked best. The onboard nRF52 chip allows the beacon to support AES-256-CTR and Unix time as the counter source, which are the most secure settings according to Hubble.

The MTB06 needed different settings because of its IN100 chip. The IN100 has no firmware, so nothing on the chip can keep Unix time. Therefore, it supports only device uptime, or how long the chip has been awake.

For the encryption method, Hubble recommends AES-128-EAX with a rotation period exponent of 15 for IN100 chips. This setting lets the device rotate its EID about every nine hours, so it repeats only after 48 days.

Note: Confirm your device key settings are correct before completing registration. Hubble fixes the encryption mode at registration, so if you made a mistake, you need to register a new device.

Sending Minew the Device IDs and Keys

For this exercise, I sent the device ID and key pairs via email to Minew. For a production run, Hubble’s provisioning at scale guide recommends using a secure channel, such as an encrypted transfer or a shared secrets store, to keep others from viewing your Hubble device data.

Handoff to Minew

Once the key list reached Minew, they handled the rest themselves. They loaded a key into each beacon, powered both on at their factory, and shipped them activated, meaning each beacon was broadcasting during the entire shipping journey.

To confirm the beacons were set up correctly, Minew asked me to add one of their representatives to my Hubble account via Settings > Manage Team. This way they could check whether the Hubble network was properly detecting the beacons. Without this setting, no one from Minew could see whether my beacons were transmitting to Hubble, or what their locations and payloads were.

I had no view of Minew’s production line, but I could see my beacons’ progression on the Hubble dashboard. Both devices started reporting packets from Shenzhen, China, which is Minew’s home base. Over the next several weeks, I could track both beacons as they moved toward a Chinese seaport, crossed the Pacific Ocean, and entered the United States of America.

Receiving the Beacons

About a month after I ordered the beacons, I received the two Minew beacons at my door.

To confirm the beacons were mine, I opened the Hubble Connect app on my phone and held it next to them. Once I saw E9_1 and MTB06_1, which were the names of the device keys I had created at the beginning of this process, I knew the beacons on my desk were the same ones Minew had configured for me.

Since I received the beacons, they have stayed connected to the Hubble network and have been updating periodically in my dashboard.

Next Steps

By working with Minew, a Hubble ODM, I was able to configure, activate, and ship two types of Hubble beacons to my door with minimal effort. This process is very similar for other ODMs: register the device keys, send them over, and the manufacturer handles everything else. Another perk with ODMs is that you can check their progress in your Hubble dashboard even before they ship your devices. Register your production devices at dash.hubble.com today to get started.

Ready to connect your devices anywhere on Earth? Get started with Hubble Network for free →