Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy

Chapter 7. Application Design Tools

This chapter introduces useful tools for mobile application developers, including code templates available for common mobile operating systems, inexpensive hardware platforms that can be used to simulate physical BLE devices (useful if you don’t have your own hardware available at the early stages of app development), as well as some purely software-based tools that can help debug and develop your application.

Bluetooth Application Accelerator

Bluetooth Low Energy is heavily concentrated on the mobile computing space, specifically mobile phones and tablets, with some adoption on traditional desktop computer and laptops—especially in the human interface device (HID) category, mostly for mice and keyboards. In recognition of this, the Bluetooth SIG introduced the Bluetooth Application Accelerator initiative to make adopting Bluetooth Low Energy much easier for application designers.

The Application Accelerator is essentially a set of software templates that make it relatively painless to create basic BLE applications on iOS, Android, and Windows RT 8.1 platforms. It also includes simple example code that shows how to connect and work with GATT services and characteristics.

Some knowledge of the specific platform is required, of course, but the templates should make it relatively easy to get up to speed on the BLE-specific calls required to interact with the target peripheral devices. The program requires registration, but no fees. For more details, ...