Activity Spotlight

Light Up Your Campsite with Bluetooth LE

Bluetooth LE (BLE) is ubiquitous at this point, it's available in phones, fitness bands, lights, doorbells, refrigerators... and the list goes on. Just wander around the office with a BLE scanner (read: your phone) and marvel at the number of 'things' that pop up. BLE can also be used to power the next great product or evolution in your market. I recently had the opportunity to build a new product leveraging BLE to gather information in bike sharing systems. In the process of exploring the producer side of this technology, I learned that it is much easier to do than I imagined. Come on down to learn how you can leverage free (or cheap) tools and technologies to make your next great product! Why attend? The goal of the session is to learn (or remember) a bit about Bluetooth LE. We’ll take a look at what it takes to develop ‘to the metal’ on the hardware and hopefully come away with a couple takeaways… 1) It’s not as hard as you may have thought and 2) it’s not as easy as (some tech you think is super easy) :) The talk is really targeted towards Makers, Hardware Enthusiasts and Engineers who want to dip their toes into firmware development and haven’t yet had the opportunity. This is the sort of work you’ll likely need to do if your goal is to produce a commercial / open source product based on these technologies. What the session is NOT…. This won’t be an exhaustive review of BLE, there just simply isn’t the time, nor honestly, are all the nuts and bolts particularly thrilling presentation material :) This also isn’t a sales pitch for Nordic Semi, their tools just happen to be those I am familiar with and I do feel that they provide a pretty slick developer experience. It also really isn’t a sales pitch for ‘to the metal’ development, but rather an introduction to help you decide whether this is a path you want to travel. Lastly, I’m not going to be showing 'Best Practices' here, this is a little more in depth than ‘Hello World’, but we’re going to be focused on getting the solution to work, not making it as elegant or maintainable as possible. BLE / firmware development is something I’m pretty interested in on a personal level, so if you have experience here or best practices / burnt fingers you’re willing to share, I’d love to hear them!