Getting started with bluetooth low energy kevin townsend

Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy by Kevin Townsend, Carles Cufí, Akiba, Robert Davidson

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Preface

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which was introduced as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 specification, is an exciting wireless technology that gives mobile application developers unprecedented access to external hardware and provides hardware engineers with easy and reliable access to their devices from every major mobile operating system.

This book aims to provide a solid, practical, high-level understanding of Bluetooth Low Energy: how data is organized, how devices communicate with each other, and the key design decisions and tradeoffs that were made by the protocol design teams. It should leave you with enough of an understanding of BLE to approach the high-level APIs on most modern embedded devices and mobile operating systems with confidence and enable you to make sense of the terminology and naming conventions in more in-depth technical documentation when you need to dig deeper. It should also clarify some of the specific strengths and limitations that distinguish BLE from other wireless technologies, such as WiFi, NFC, classic Bluetooth, Zigbee, and so on.

Experienced embedded firmware engineers will leave better prepared to dive deeper into the existing technical documentation, and mobile application developers will have a clearer idea of how data is organized in BLE devices and how to communicate with existing hardware.

Who This Book Is For

This book intends to serve two main audiences:

Mobile application developers First, the book serves as a high-level conceptual overview of Bluetooth Low Energy for mobile application developers who want to design applications capable of talking to physical devices in the outside world, but who might not find the official 2,600-page Bluetooth Core Specification 4.1 particularly easy to approach. Embedded engineers On the other side of the coin, the book is also for traditional embedded engineers who are considering Bluetooth Low Energy from a product design point of view. If you need to get up to speed quickly on what BLE is and isn’t, this book should help you quickly evaluate its strengths and weaknesses as a wireless protocol for your project.

How to Use This Book

This book is organized into three main sections.

Overview of BLE

The first four chapters provide a high-level overview of Bluetooth Low Energy as a technology, explaining how data is organized and what its key limitations are, while also introducing all the key concepts that you’re likely to encounter working with BLE:

Chapter 1, Introduction The first chapter introduces the basic concepts of the wireless standard known as Bluetooth Low Energy. It briefly describes the essentials required for understanding the most important elements of the technology and gives an outline of the different specification and chip configurations that can be found today. This chapter also introduces and explains elementary concepts fundamental to BLE, such as broadcasting, connections, and the different roles that devices can assume. Chapter 2, Protocol Basics This chapter focuses on the protocol stack as a whole and the different entities that belong to it. It gives an overview of each of the protocol layers and their essential features, filtering out details from the specification that are not directly relevant to BLE application developers. Each layer is described in the context of the role it assumes as part of the bigger picture, with special attention to the impact it might have in real-life scenarios. Chapter 3, GAP (Advertising and Connections) This chapter presents the Generic Access Profile (GAP), which governs the advertising process as well as connections. It gives an overview of the modes and procedures that allow devices to interact using both advertising packets to broadcast information and connections to exchange data. Chapter 4, GATT (Services and Characteristics) This chapter provides an overview of the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT), which establishes the hierarchy and format used to represent and manipulate data in BLE. It introduces the fundamental concepts of services and characteristics, as well as the procedures that allow connected devices to exchange data with each other.

Tools for Development and Testing

The next three chapters present useful tools (both hardware and software) for developing or testing BLE-enabled applications or devices. These chapters focus on low-cost, easily accessible tools to help you get started without investing thousands of dollars:

Chapter 5, Hardware Platforms This chapter provides product designers with an overview of some of the latest embedded development platforms for BLE peripherals or products. Chapter 6, Debugging Tools Whether you’re designing your own device or designing an application that talks to existing hardware, you’ll almost certainly have many hours of debugging ahead of you. Debugging wireless devices is a different process than purely software-based development. This chapter presents some useful debugging tools for working with BLE and seeing what’s actually being sent over the air. Chapter 7, Application Design Tools This chapter presents key tools for mobile application developers working with BLE. These tools will help you quickly test and verify your software or even simulate devices, if you don’t have access to real hardware early in the design process.

Development Platforms

Finally, the last three chapters introduce the main development platforms you are likely to work with for BLE (iOS and Android for appication developers, and various embedded platforms for product designs and embedded harware engineers):

Chapter 8, Android Programming This chapter provides a basic overview of the hardware, software, and processes required to implement Bluetooth Low Energy on the Android operating system. Chapter 9, iOS Programming This chapter explores some of the key iOS 7 frameworks, classes, and methods that support BLE application development. Examples explore application development using BLE to read the battery level of a peripheral and an application that uses the iBeacon for location determination. Chapter 10, Embedded Application Development This chapter introduces the tools needed to compile code for embedded devices. Using the nRF51822-EK discussed in Chapter 5 with the free, open source GNU toolchain and cross-compiler for ARM, you’ll create a heart rate monitor example to run natively on the nRF51822 SoC.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions. Constant width Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords. Constant width bold Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user. Constant width italic Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Tip

This element signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

Warning

This element indicates a warning or caution.

Источник

Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy : Tools and Techniques for Low-Power Networking

With Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), smart devices are about to become even smarter. This practical guide demonstrates how this exciting wireless technology helps developers build mobile apps that share data with external hardware, and how hardware engineers can gain easy and reliable access to mobile operating systems.

This book provides a solid, high-level overview of how devices use BLE to communicate with each other. You’ll learn useful low-cost tools for developing and testing BLE-enabled mobile apps and embedded firmware and get examples using various development platforms—including iOS and Android for app developers and embedded platforms for product designers and hardware engineers.

• Understand how data is organized and transferred by BLE devices
• Explore BLE’s concepts, key limitations, and network topology
• Dig into the protocol stack to grasp how and why BLE operates
• Learn how BLE devices discover each other and establish secure connections
• Set up the tools and infrastructure for BLE application development
• Get examples for connecting BLE to iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and sensors
• Develop code for a simple device that transmits heart rate data to a mobile device

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Об авторе (2014)

Kevin Townsend specializes in embedded design and development around the ARM Cortex M family of microprocessors, and has a long-standing interest in low-power wireless communication. He’s active in the open source hardware world as lead engineer at Adafruit Industries, where his job is taking interesting technologies in the embedded engineering space and getting them into the hands of domain experts in other fields to see what interesting solutions they can come up with when technology becomes invisible.

Carles Cufí has been involved with Bluetooth since the year 2000. Starting at Parrot in Paris with version 1.0 of the specification, he wrote one of the first protocol stacks to be shipped on a commercial product, and he has been involved with the development and implementation of Bluetooth devices and systems ever since. He is currently employed by Nordic Semiconductor, where he is responsible for the Bluetooth Low Energy Application Programming Interfaces offered to the developers using the nRF51 family of Integrated Circuits.

Akiba has been involved in wireless sensor networks since 2003. He wrote FreakZ, an open source Zigbee protocol stack, and also Chibi, an open source 802.15.4 protocol stack. He’s a researcher for Keio University in the Internet and Society research group, and is a design consultant to the United Nations. His specialty and interest is in sensor networks for environmental monitoring. He currently runs FreakLabs, an open source wireless company, and is working on a hackerspace in the Japanese countryside called Hackerfarm.

Robert Davidson’s passion in life is to apply what he knows about technology to solve real problems for people. He especially enjoys applications that use sensors to connect the physical world to computers and the Internet. He runs Ambient Sensors, a company focused on sensors and wireless sensor networks, and has a strong interest in the development of startup companies (and the scars to prove it). He especially enjoys sharing his interests and expertise with others.

Библиографические данные

Название	Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy: Tools and Techniques for Low-Power Networking EBSCOhost ebooks online
Авторы	Kevin Townsend , Carles Cufí , Akiba , Robert Davidson
Издатель	«O’Reilly Media, Inc.», 2014
ISBN	149190058X, 9781491900581
Количество страниц	Всего страниц: 180
&nbsp	&nbsp
Экспорт цитаты	BiBTeX EndNote RefMan

Источник

Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy

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Book description

With Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), smart devices are about to become even smarter. This practical guide demonstrates how this exciting wireless technology helps developers build mobile apps that share data with external hardware, and how hardware engineers can gain easy and reliable access to mobile operating systems.

This book provides a solid, high-level overview of how devices use BLE to communicate with each other. You’ll learn useful low-cost tools for developing and testing BLE-enabled mobile apps and embedded firmware and get examples using various development platforms—including iOS and Android for app developers and embedded platforms for product designers and hardware engineers.

• Understand how data is organized and transferred by BLE devices
• Explore BLE’s concepts, key limitations, and network topology
• Dig into the protocol stack to grasp how and why BLE operates
• Learn how BLE devices discover each other and establish secure connections
• Set up the tools and infrastructure for BLE application development
• Get examples for connecting BLE to iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and sensors
• Develop code for a simple device that transmits heart rate data to a mobile device

Источник