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In any BLE application, there are (at least) two devices involved: a BLE Peripheral device and a BLE Central device. Usually, the BLE Central is a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean it has to be! What if: you do not want to have to launch an app everytime you want to control a BLE Peripheral? you want to have a dedicated device that acts as the remote control for the Peripheral device? you want to utilize Bluetooth 5 features such as the long-range feature (Coded PHY)? (which currently does not exist in any smartphone) you want to learn more about how a BLE Central works and how to develop one yourself? In this case, a dedicated BLE Central device can make a lot more sense than using a…
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Let’s face it… One of the hardest things when working with BLE is simply getting started. Whether it’s the setup of the IDE, the configuration of the project, or the implementation the BLE application. I’ve been there… I’ve felt lost, not knowing where and how to start… This is especially true since I was trying to learn the technology itself (BLE) in addition to learning an SDK, platform, and IDE all at once! It just felt overwhelming and way too many things to learn at one time. Lately, I’ve been focusing on one platform/chipset: Nordic’s nRF52. This is due to one main reason: I’ve found it to be the most developer-friendly platform out there. (It also helps that you get a FREE commercial license for a…
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The complete step-by-step cross-platform nRF development tutorial (for Windows, macOS, Linux) In a previous blog post (The complete nRF Mac developmeent tutorial), I went over how to set up your nRF development environment using the NetBeans IDE on a Mac. The beauty with NetBeans is that it’s cross-platform and customizable to fit your needs. I had been using NetBeans for over a decade, so I was very comfortable with customizing and modifying the different settings and configurations to make it work. Unfortunately, the setup was quite lengthy and involved many changes to make it work, especially with on-target debugging. Even then, it wouldn’t work quite as well as I would like it to. Not to mention, the setup was different for each of the three main operating systems…
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Introduction In this second post in the series on Bluetooth 5, we cover the new feature of improved 2x speed along with a general overview of throughput for a BLE application (the previous post went over Bluetooth 5’s new features in general and more specifically covered the increased advertisement capacity feature). First, we need to understand that the speeds advertised (1 Mbps and the new 2 Mbps) are only theoretical and are cut down when it comes down to application throughput. This is due to multiple reasons which we’ll go over in the next section. The Bluetooth 5 “2x speed” feature requires a hardware update so older devices/chips/modules will not support it. It is also important to note that in order to achieve this higher…
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You’ve probably heard so much about the recently released Bluetooth 5. You’ve seen all the hype on 2x Speed, 4x Range, and 8x Advertising data increase capabilities. But what does this all mean?? How does it achieve all these improvements? Is it really possible to achieve all these simultaneously?? What about power consumption? How is that affected? Look: There was so much media hype surrounding the release of Bluetooth 5, and lots of conflicting information with very few details. Many media articles made it sound like you can achieve all these simultaneously! In this first post of a series on Bluetooth 5, I’ll go ahead and demystify all these facts for you as well as cover Bluetooth 5 Advertisements in detail. The goal with this series…
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