Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy: Tools and Techniques for Low-Power Networking

With Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), smart devices are about to become even smarter. This practical guide demonstrates how this exciting wireless technology helps developers build mobile apps that share data with external hardware, and how hardware engineers can gain easy and reliable access to mobile operating systems.

This book provides a solid, high-level overview of how devices use BLE to communicate with each other. You'll learn useful low-cost tools for developing and testing BLE-enabled mobile apps and embedded firmware and get examples using various development platforms--including iOS and Android for app developers and embedded platforms for product designers and hardware engineers.

• Understand how data is organized and transferred by BLE devices
• Explore BLE's concepts, key limitations, and network topology
• Dig into the protocol stack to grasp how and why BLE operates
• Learn how BLE devices discover each other and establish secure connections
• Set up the tools and infrastructure for BLE application development
• Get examples for connecting BLE to iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and sensors
• Develop code for a simple device that transmits heart rate data to a mobile device

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 hardware 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.

Carles Cufí has been involved with Bluetooth since the year 2000. Starting at Parrot in Paris with version 1.0 of the specification, he wrote one of the first protocol stacks to be shipped on a commercial product, and he has been involved with the development and implementation of Bluetooth devices and systems ever since. He is currently employed by Nordic Semiconductor, where he is responsible for the Bluetooth Low Energy Application Programming Interfaces offered to the developers using the nRF51 family of Integrated Circuits.

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.

Robert Davidson's passion in life is to apply what he knows about technology to solve real problems for people. He especially enjoys applications that use sensors to connect the physical world to computers and the Internet. He runs Ambient Sensors, a company focused on sensors and wireless sensor networks, and has a strong interest in the development of startup companies (and the scars to prove it). He especially enjoys sharing his interests and expertise with others.