BLE Development Update
A little while back you may have noticed we started working on a Bluetooth Low Energy API for mbed, and a partnership with Nordic Semiconductor to make it available on a microcontroller with the Bluetooth LE radio built in. It has been developing really well, so we thought we'd share some of the progress with you!
The main goal is to enable Bluetooth LE and create an API that allows you to focus on creating interesting and innovative applications, instead of reading through the core Bluetooth specifications (which we certainly have had to!). We're also building hardware and an HDK to simplify creating the physical devices themselves.
The initial development we have done is based on a two-chip solution. In the labs we use a mbed LPC1768 talking to the nRF51822 development board over UART running Nordics Bluetooth LE Stack (aka SoftDevice). As the API is almost complete, we'll soon move to fully integrating this to a single chip solution, with mbed running natively on the Cortex-M0 in the nRF51822 chip!
An example of how this looks, you can create a common Bluetooth Low Energy service like the Battery Level service or a Beacon using the example programs:
[Repository '/teams/Bluetooth-Low-Energy/code/BLE_BatteryLevel_Example/' not found]
[Repository '/teams/Bluetooth-Low-Energy/code/BLE_iBeacon_Example/' not found]
There's still a fair amount of design effort involved, but if you're really eager and want to help with development and testing, you can see all the work we are doing under the Bluetooth Low Energy Development Team we've setup, including the hardware we're using and recreate our lab setup. We'd love to hear what you think so far. At this stage while it is all still in development, some familiarity with BLE will be helpful and an understanding that this is not ready for general use, but you should be able to get something working!
And if you are interested in being a tester when this reaches beta on the single-chip hardware, please tell us what you might build!
7 comments on BLE Development Update:
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That's great news! Is that potentially the smallest Cortex-M device that's capable of running mbed code?
What's the workflow like between Nordic and you? If Nordic update their SoftDevice stack, is the independently capable of being revved from the mbed API code?