Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
phenomenal growth in smartphones, tablets, and mobile computing. Early and active
adoption of BLE by mobile industry heavyweights like Apple and Samsung broke open
the doors for wider implementation of BLE.
Apple, in particular, has put significant effort into producing a reliable BLE stack and
publishing design guidelines around BLE. This, in turn, pushed silicon vendors to
commit their limited resources to the technology they felt was the most likely to succeed
or flourish in the long run, and the Apple stamp of approval is clearly a compelling
argument when you need to justify every research and development dollar invested.
While the mobile and tablet markets become increasingly mature and costs and margins
are decreasing, the need for connectivity with the outside world on these devices has a
huge growth potential, and it offers peripheral vendors a unique opportunity to provide
innovative solutions to problems people might not even realize that they have today.
So many benefits have converged around BLE, and the doors have been opened wide
for small, nimble product designers to gain access to a potentially massive market with
task-specific, creative, and innovative products on a relatively modest design budget.
You can purchase all-in-one radio-plus-microcontroller (system-on-chip) solutions
today for well under $2 per chip and in low volumes, which is well below the total overall
price point of similar wireless technologies such as WiFi, GSM, Zigbee, etc. And BLE
allows you to design viable products
today
that can talk to any modern mobile platform
using chips, tools, and standards that are easy to access.
Perhaps one of the less visible key factors contributing to the success of BLE is that it
was designed to serve as an extensible framework to exchange data. This is a funda‐
mental difference with classic Bluetooth, which focused on a strict set of use cases. BLE,
on the other hand, was conceived to allow anyone with an idea and a bunch of data
points coming from an accessory to realize it without having to know a huge amount
about the underlying technology. The smartphone vendors understood the value of this
proposition early on, and they provided flexible and relatively low-level APIs to give
mobile application developers the freedom to use the BLE framework in any way they
see fit.
Devices that talk to smartphones or tablets also offer another easy-to-underestimate
advantage for product designers: they have an unusually low barrier to adoption. Users
are already accustomed to using the handsets or tablets in their possession, which means
the burden of learning a new UI is limited, as long as we respect the rich visual language
that people have grown accustomed to in the platforms they use.
With a relatively easy-to-understand data model, no intrusive licensing costs, no fees
to access the core specs, and a lean overall protocol stack, it should be clear why platform
designers and mobile vendors see a winner in BLE.
