Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
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 plat‐
forms 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, specif‐
ically 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 Ap‐
plication 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 rela‐
tively 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, see the
Bluetooth Developer Portal
.
SensorTag
While most people would associate Texas Instruments (TI) with hardware design, as
part of its BLE development ecosystem, TI has released an interesting and low-cost BLE
