Sending Inertia Motion Unit Data of Arduino Nano BLE 33 over Bluetooth BLE

Sebastian Tomczak has developed an Arduino sketch and Max patch which takes the inertia motion unit data of the Nano BLE 33 and sends it via Bluetooth BLE using the ArduinoBLE library.

The data is transferred as a set of BLE Characteristics as a BLE Service. The Max patch scans for the BLE device, connects to it and then subscribes to the data streams. The output can be normalised, smoothed and then routed via MIDI to music software such as Ableton. The Max patch uses the max-ble external.

With Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), devices do not need to pair in order to communicate data. Instead, a paradigm of central and peripheral devices is used. Central devices scan for Peripheral devices and initiate connections. Peripheral devices advertise their BLE Services and wait for a Central device to connect. In this example, the computer running the Max patch is the Central and the Arduino Nano BLE 33 is the Peripheral.

A given Service on a Peripheral device is made up of one or more Characteristics. A Characteristic contains one or more bytes of data and may be part of a standard profile or a generic type with customised data length. Each Service and Characteristic has a UUID unique identifier that is either a 16-bit or 128-bit string. The Arduino BLE library contains a number of functions to create a BLE Service and Characteristic.

Read more in the post here. Get the Arduino code here, the Max patch here and the 4bf subpatch here.


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