BLE provides versatile wireless communication at a very low power consumption, especially compared to classic Bluetooth and WiFi.

It has a wide range of uses where proximity detection is used for a lot of applications such as alerting when a keychain goes out of range or requesting alerts from lost objects. Among consumer products, Apple iBeacons is a notable application of the technology. However, it is also used for human input devices such as mice and keyboards as well as various forms of sensors, e.g. temperature, heart rate, etc.

BLE enables devices to run off coincell batteries for years while retaining connections or doing periodic broadcasting. This makes the technology appealing for the maker community for applications that are power-constrained, e.g. due to having a limited power-budget (say, running off a small PV-cell) or running off a battery.

This talk explains how the low power consumption is achieved, what the possible topologies are, and how this affects the types of applications you can build on top. Finally, a low-level demonstration of interfacing with a BLE controller is performed.

Michael Knudsen

Michael has been involved in various open source-related projects. His dayjob involves writing firmware for a BT/wifi controller for a semiconductor company.