Using Bluetooth LE in Products

Using Bluetooth LE in Products

Jone Teel over Makezine walked through how to use BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy ), aka Bluetooth smart, in an electronic product.

BLE, unlike classic Bluetooth, it’s not designed for big data transmission or streaming audio or video. BLE comes in SoC (System on Chip) ICs which combine a RF transceiver and a microcontroller running the Bluetooth stack (firmware) all in a single chip but you can still have the transceiver alone and run the software stack firmware on your processor.

Possible Hardware Configuration in BLE Solutions – Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy by Kevin Townsend, Carles Cufí, Akiba, and Robert Davidson (O’Reilly)

According to Jone, the software stack of Bluetooth Classic must be purchased separately and costs at least $10,000 USD plus a per unit licensing fee for every unit sold. Now, BLE SoC makers provide the software stack free in most cases. For example, Nordic Semiconductors provides the software stack S110, S120 and S130 SoftDevice for free.

most popular BLE chip solutions - Makezine
most popular BLE chip solutions – Makezine

 

Jone advises to use ready made BLE modules rather than chips and this will reduce the costs required for FCC certification and eliminate the need for antenna tuning.

Jone ends his article talking about the Antenna design solutions using a ceramic antenna or a trace antenna on PCB.

Via: Makezine

Please follow and like us:
Pin Share

Embedded Hardware Engineer interested in open hardware and was born in the same year as Linux. Yahya is the editor-in-chief of Atadiat and believes in the importance of sharing free, practical, spam-free and high quality written content with others. His experience with Embedded Systems includes developing firmware with bare-metal C and Arduino, designing PCB&schematic and content creation.

view all posts by yahya
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Get new posts by email:
Get new posts by email:

Join 97,426 other subscribers

Archives