Book Image

IoT Projects with Bluetooth Low Energy

By : Madhur Bhargava
Book Image

IoT Projects with Bluetooth Low Energy

By: Madhur Bhargava

Overview of this book

Bluetooth Low Energy, or Bluetooth Smart, is Wireless Personal Area networking aimed at smart devices and IoT applications. BLE has been increasingly adopted by application developers and IoT enthusiasts to establish connections between smart devices. This book initially covers all the required aspects of BLE, before you start working on IoT projects. In the initial stages of the book, you will learn about the basic aspects of Bluetooth Low Energy—such as discovering devices, services, and characteristics—that will be helpful for advanced-level projects. This book will guide you through building hands-on projects using BLE and IoT. These projects include tracking health data, using a mobile App, and making this data available for health practitioners; Indoor navigation; creating beacons using the Raspberry Pi; and warehouse weather Monitoring. This book also covers aspects of Bluetooth 5 (the latest release) and its effect on each of these projects. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience of using Bluetooth Low Energy to integrate with smart devices and IoT projects.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Bluetooth 5


Bluetooth 5 was announced by the Bluetooth SIG on June 16, 2016 to be arriving in late 2016, and it was finally officially unveiled on December 7, 2016. As per the initial advertisement, it was announced to have "Quadruple the range of its predecessor, double the speed, and 8 times the broadcasting capacity," for low energy connections.

Let's examine each of the factors one by one so that we can understand the practical implications of each of them.

8 Times the Broadcasting Capacity

Currently, Bluetooth Low Energy (4.2) offers advertising packet sizes of 31 bytes and BLE 5 allows this to increase by a factor of eight, that is, the broadcasting capacity of a BLE 5 device would be 255 bytes.

To understand this better, let's perform a small experiment. In Chapter 5, Beacons with Raspberry Pi, we configured our Raspberry Pi to broadcast a URL as an Eddystone Beacon. We shall repeat the same experiment here, however, with a little twist.

In terms of the setup, this time, instead of the...