Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth has been fairly limited to connecting wireless headsets and the occasional audio system, but Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is poised to change that, opening up the technology to groundbreaking uses in a variety of fields and networked devices. This book provides nonspecialist hardware and software engineers will learn the tools and techniques they need to add BLE to a new or existing product.

You’ll learn how BLE’s reduced power consumption and lower cost than “classic” Bluetooth makes this wireless technology a perfect choice for a wide variety of mobile phones, tablets, and computers.

• Learn the basics of BLE protocols and radio propagation
• Explore BLE techniques and ideas through application projects
• Set up the tools and infrastructure for BLE application development
• Get examples for connecting BLE to iPhones and iPads, Android handsets and tablets, Macs, and sensors
• Use the micropositioning system iBeacon to connect devices with the Internet of Things

Kevin Townsend specializes in embedded design and development around the ARM Cortex M family of microprocessors, and has a long-standing interest in low-power wireless communication. He's active in the open source HW world as lead engineer at Adafruit Industries, where his job is taking interesting technologies in the embedded engineering space and getting them into the hands of domain experts in other fields to see what interesting solutions they can come up with when technology becomes invisible.

Robert Davidson's passion in life is to apply what he knows about technology to solve real problems that are important to solve. He especially enjoys applications that involve materials, thermal, and electromagnetic problems with a mix of computation and experiment. At the same time, he enjoys sharing what he knows, both formally and informally. He believes really understanding a subject means that he can provide a clear explanation to the non-specialist as well as the specialist. He also loves non-technical subjects such as developing startup companies and learning what makes an organization successful, not only in a P&L sense, but also in a way that makes the lives of those involved feel rewarded and fulfilled.

Akiba has been involved in wireless sensor networks since 2003. He wrote FreakZ, an open source Zigbee protocol stack, and also Chibi, an open source 802.15.4 protocol stack. He's a researcher for Keio University in the Internet and Society research group, and is a design consultant to the United Nations. His specialty and interest is in sensor networks for environmental monitoring. He currently runs FreakLabs, an open source wireless company, and is working on a hackerspace in the Japanese countryside called Hackerfarm.