Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
This combination of sensors opens up a number of unique opportunities for data col‐
lection and rich user interaction. The accelerometer and magnetometer can be com‐
bined to collect reasonably accurate three-axis rotational data, the pressure sensor can
measure changes in altitude as the device moves up or down, and so on.
Most importantly, the SensorTag platform allows application developpers to talk to real
hardware and get real sensor data with a minimum of fuss and without having to learn
how to design peripherals themselves or make progress on the app while they wait for
working hardware from other specialists working on the project.
For more details, or to order a device, visit TI's
SensorTag product page
.
LightBlue for iOS
Many mobile application developers might not be interested in designing their own BLE
hardware, but instead want to talk to existing BLE peripherals that are already available
on the market.
While some of the debugging tools discussed in
Chapter 6
will no doubt be useful to
app designers, anyone with a recent iOS device has access to an extremely useful tool
from Punch Through Design called LightBlue. This free application, which is
available
in the App Store
, can be used to reverse engineer or even emulate any BLE peripheral
from an iPhone or an iPad.
You can use LightBlue to interact with services and characteristics a device exposes—
for example, reading or writing individual values. You can also use it to
capture
the
unique signature of an existing BLE peripheral once and then play that signature back
for development purposes, essentially emulating the device that you might not have
access to day to day.
If you know what the device should look like, but real hardware isn't available, you can
also create a profile to imitate your peripheral and then create a device that will appear
exactly the same as the hardware once it is available, as shown in
Figure 7-2
.
A version of LightBlue is also available for OS X in Apple's App Store, although the iOS
version offers more functionality at the time of this writing.
Application developers can also use LightBlue when developing a BLE peripheral but
before the counterpart iOS or Android application has been completed. You can sim‐
ulate the over-the-air interactions between central and peripheral, allowing you to de‐
bug the peripheral's firmware without yet having a custom application developed on
the central.
