It was referred to as Bluetooth 4.0 / Bluetooth Low energy BTLE, but now it’s Bluetooth Smart – What is Bluetooth Smart Technology?
Bluetooth Smart wireless technology is the ultra-power efficient, application-friendly version of Bluetooth transforming the wireless industry. This technology introduces new opportunities in industry verticals from consumer electronics, medical devices and home automation to retail and wearables. While the power-efficiency of Bluetooth Smart makes it perfect for devices needing to run off tiny batteries for long periods, the magic of Bluetooth Smart is its ability to work with a wide variety of applications on smartphones or tablets consumers already own.
Bluetooth Smart is developer-friendly, inexpensive and offers flexible development architecture. All major operating systems natively support Bluetooth Smart making it easy for developers to create apps that link with everyday objects like heart-rate monitors, toothbrushes, and even shoes. With Bluetooth Smart, developers are only limited by their imaginations.
Read more here and here.
Getting Started with the nRF8001 Bluefruit LE Breakout @ The Adafruit Learning System.
Our nRF8001 Breakout allows you to establish an easy to use wireless link between your Arduino and any compatible iOS or Android (4.3+) device. It works by simulating a UART device beneath the surface, sending ASCII data back and forth between the devices, letting you decide what data to send and what to do with it on either end of the connection.
Unlike classic Bluetooth, BLE has no big contracts to sign and no major hoops that you have to jump through to create iOS peripherals that you can legally design and distribute in the App Store, which makes it a great choice compared to classic Bluetooth which had (and still has) a lot of restrictions around it on the iOS platform.
And now that Android also officially supports Bluetooth Low Energy (as of Android 4.3), it’s also — finally! — a universal communication channel covering the main mobile operating systems people are using today.
We can get you started super fast with this BLE module which can act like an ‘every day’ UART data link. Send and receive data up to 10 meters away, from your Arduino to an iOS device. We’ve even made it easy to get started with our very own BLE connect app that has a “serial console” for sending/receiving data and also an ‘arduino pin i/o control station” to let you set pins on your Arduino to inputs or outputs, high or low logic or even PWM output, as well as read button presses and analog inputs. You can start prototyping your accessory and then use our open source Objective C code to base your new app on!
Tutorial: Introduction to Bluetooth Low Energy @ The Adafruit Learning System.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), sometimes referred to as “Bluetooth Smart”, is a light-weight subset of classic Bluetooth and was introduced as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 core specification. While there is some overlap with classic Bluetooth, BLE actually has a completely different lineage and was started by Nokia as an in-house project called ‘Wibree’ before being adopted by the Bluetooth SIG.
There are plenty of wireless protocols out there for engineers and product designers, but what makes BLE so interesting is that it’s almost certainly the easiest way to design something that can talk to any modern mobile platform out there (iOS, Android, Windows phones, etc.), and particularly in the case of Apple devices it’s the only HW design option that doesn’t require you to jump through endless hoops to be able to legally market your product for iOS devices.
This guide will give you a quick overview of BLE, specifically how data is organized in Bluetooth Low Energy, and how devices advertise their presence so that you can connect to them and start passing data back and forth.
NEW PRODUCT – Bluefruit LE – Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 4.0) – nRF8001 Breakout [v1.0] :Our Adafruit Bluefruit LE (Bluetooth Low Energy) nRF8001 Breakout allows you to establish an easy to use wireless link between your Arduino and any compatible iOS or Android (4.3+) device. It works by simulating a UART device beneath the surface, sending ASCII data back and forth between the devices, letting you decide what data to send and what to do with it on either end of the connection.
Unlike classic Bluetooth, BLE has no big contracts to sign and no major hoops that you have to jump through to create iOS peripherals that you can legally design and distribute in the App Store, which makes it a great choice compared to classic Bluetooth which had (and still has) a lot of restrictions around it on the iOS platform.
And now that Android also officially supports Bluetooth Low Energy (as of Android 4.3), it’s also — finally! — a universal communication channel covering the main mobile operating systems people are using today.
We can get you started super fast with this BLE module which can act like an ‘every day’ UART data link (with an RX and TX characteristic). Send and receive data up to 10 meters away, from your Arduino to an iOS device. We’ve even made it easy to get started with our very own BLE connect app that has a “serial console” for sending/receiving data and also an ‘arduino pin i/o control station” to let you set pins on your Arduino to inputs or outputs, high or low logic or even PWM output, as well as read button presses and analog inputs. You can start prototyping your accessory and then use our open source Objective C code to base your new app on!
The nRF8001 is nice in that it is just a BLE ‘peripheral’ (client) front-end, so you can use any micrcontroller with SPI to drive it. We have example C++ code for Arduino, which you can port to any other microcontroller, but some microcontroller is required – it is not a stand-alone module!