bluez News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

June 1, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Blend Micro Arduino Board Integrates Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy Connectivity for 25 Euros

RedBearLab’s Blend Micro is an Arduino compatible board with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Enery (aka Bluetooth Smart) connectivity, that’s part of Arduino-at-heart, a partner program initiated by the developers of Arduino boards. It has been made to help design low power Internet-Of-Things (IoT) projects quickly and easily. Blend Micro technical specifications: MCU – Atmel ATmega32u4 @ 8 MHz with 32KB flash (4KB used by bootloader), 2.5 KB SRAM, and 1KB EEPROM. Connectivity – Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy via Nordic nRF8001 chip USB – 1x micro USB port I/Os: Serial (Tx/Rx) I2C, SPI PWM U to 16 Digital I/Os Up to 6 Analog inputs Operating Voltage – 3.3V Input Voltage – 5V (USB), and 3.3-12V (VIN) Power Consumption – 2mA (average – using Interrupt mode) Dimensions – 43.6 x 18.4 x 4.3mm Weight – 4g The specs are very similar to BLEDuino, except it’s slightly smaller. Blend Micro can communicate with BLE […]

July 21, 2013July 21, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Texas Instruments SensorTag Unboxing, Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy in Linux (with a Raspberry Pi)

Texas Instruments CC2541 SensorTag is a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) development kit with 6 sensors (IR temperature, humidity, pressure, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer) mainly destined at mobile application developers for iOS, and soon, Android 4.3. I’m interested in BLE, as I expect most new phones with come with BT 4.0 BLE (aka Bluetooth SMART), and this technology may help bring the Internet of things to life, allowing us to interact with sensors, smart appliance (e.g. light switch)… Since it just costs $25 (including international shipping), I decided to buy it, and give it a try. Today, I’ll show some unboxing pictures, and how to communicate with the kit using the Linux command line. TI SensorTag Unboxing I ordered it at the end of May, and receive it by Fedex on the 18th of July, about 7 weeks later, in the package below. Inside we’ve got a Quick Start Guide for iOS […]

January 15, 2013January 15, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Bluetooth Smart Devices and Low Energy support on Linux – ELCE 2012

Andre Guedes and João Paulo Rechi Vita, software engineers at Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia (INdT), give a presentation about Bluetooth Low Energy support on Linux (BlueZ stack) at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Barcelona on November 5, 2012. Abstract: This presentation will cover a brief introduction on how the Bluetooth Low Energy technology works. Then it will present the current status of its support on Linux, presenting the available APIs and how to interact with Bluetooth Smart devices. Then we’ll present the profiles we’re currently working on and what support can be expected to be found on Linux and BlueZ this year. There will be also a few demos of Bluetooth Smart devices working on Linux. The audience of this talk is application or framework developers that want to add support for Bluetooth Smart devices to their software, hardware vendors,and technology curious. Basic Bluetooth understanding is recommended but not […]