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

Introduction to Beacons


Stating simply, a Beacon is a small wireless device, which transmits continuous radio/Bluetooth Low Energy signals. Depending on the protocol being used, these signals package contextual information, which can then be intercepted by nearby Bluetooth Low Energy devices (which in most cases are smart phones), and then depending on the context and use case, the intercepted information is either presented to the user or sent to a backend for further processing or both.

Figure 1: Various types of Beacons

Apart from the hardware itself, a protocol plays an important role and is one of the fundamental building blocks of any Beacon-related application use case. In very simple words, for the purpose of wireless communication, a protocol is a set of rules defining data transmission in a wireless channel.

Note

Do not get confused between a protocol and the Beacon itself. A Beacon is a piece of hardware whereas a protocol is the way in which data is structured and transmitted by...