Chapter 1, What is Bluetooth Low Energy, introduces the reader to Bluetooth Low Energy and its various building blocks—Profiles, Services, Characteristics, and Descriptors.

Chapter 2, Setting Up, sets up the development environment to execute the Android and iOS code samples included in the book.

Chapter 3, Building a Service Explorer App, solidifies our understanding of the concepts introduced in the first chapter by building a Service Explorer app that can be used to explore services on any Bluetooth Low Energy device. We eventually use the same app to explore services on a fitness tracker, read heart rate data, and upload it to a remote Firebase backend.

Chapter 4, Designing a Personal Tracking System, focuses on a key concept in IoT, that is, proximity. We design a Personal Tracker app using an iTag. The app uses the RSSI received from an iTag to approximate the distance between the app-hosting device and the iTag.

Chapter 5, Beacons with Raspberry Pi, introduces the reader to one of the key cornerstones of IoT, that is, Beacons, and the two primary Beacon protocols—Eddystone and iBeacon. In addition, we also configure a Raspberry Pi to be used as an Eddystone Beacon and write an Android and iOS app to detect it.

Chapter 6, Weather Monitoring Using BLE in Warehouses, shows you how to combine the knowledge that you gained in the previous chapters and address a real-life problem revolving around BLE and IoT. We introduce a new sensor type and build a Weather Monitoring app using that sensor.

Chapter 7, Going Further, discusses the future of BLE and IoT by introducing the reader to various use cases and products based on Bluetooth Low Energy, that are already available or will become available on the consumer market in the future.

This book will guide you through the installation of all the tools that you need to follow the code samples. Code samples introduced in various chapters are for both Android and iOS platforms hence you will need to install the Android Studio and XCode IDEs. Since simulators lack Bluetooth functionality, hence you will need physical Android and iOS devices to run the code samples. In terms of hardware, you will be needing a Raspberry Pi for the Code Lab specific for Chapter 5, Beacons with Raspberry Pi. For Chapter 4, Designing a Personal Tracking System, and Chapter 6, Weather Monitoring Using BLE in Warehouses, you will be needing a very low cost iTag and the Texas Instruments Sensor Tag. All of the hardware can be easily procured online.

This book is intended for anyone with a technical bend of mind who wants to gain practical knowledge of BLE via its usage in IoT projects. Although the book has a fairly practical undertone, it starts by building a theoretical foundation of Bluetooth Low Energy, finally using that foundation as a platform to design practical projects and solutions, and hence it can be picked up by novices and experts alike.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, folder names, filenames, and file extensions  are shown as follows:

"Double-click on the downloaded .dmg file and in the shown dialog, copy the Android Studio executable to the Applications directory."

A block of code is set as follows:

private void initialiseBluetooth() {
bluetoothManager = 
(BluetoothManager)getSystemService
(Context.BLUETOOTH_SERVICE);
bluetoothAdapter = bluetoothManager.getAdapter();
bluetoothLeScanner = bluetoothAdapter.getBluetoothLeScanner(); 
} 

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

bluetoothAdapter = bluetoothManager.getAdapter();
bluetoothLeScanner = bluetoothAdapter.getBluetoothLeScanner();

Any command-line, (including commands at the R console) input or output is written as follows:

$ npm install --save eddystone-beacon

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."

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