Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy

Preface

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which was introduced as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 specification, is an exciting wireless technology that gives mobile application developers unprecedented access to external hardware and provides hardware engineers with easy and reliable access to their devices from every major mobile operating system.

This book aims to provide a solid, practical, high-level understanding of Bluetooth Low Energy: how data is organized, how devices communicate with each other, and the key design decisions and tradeoffs that were made by the protocol design teams. It should leave you with enough of an understanding of BLE to approach the high-level APIs on most modern embedded devices and mobile operating systems with confidence and enable you to make sense of the terminology and naming conventions in more in-depth technical documentation when you need to dig deeper. It should also clarify some of the specific strengths and limitations that distinguish BLE from other wireless technologies, such as WiFi, NFC, classic Bluetooth, Zigbee, and so on.

Experienced embedded firmware engineers will leave better prepared to dive deeper into the existing technical documentation, and mobile application developers will have a clearer idea of how data is organized in BLE devices and how to communicate with existing hardware.

Who This Book Is For

This book intends to serve two main audiences:

Mobile application developers

First, the book serves as a high-level conceptual overview ...