Some questions for those that know how to build BLE sensors.

Hi,

Great work!

For building BLE enabled sensors:

There are nearly a dozen of companies which make BLE solutions and there are hundreds of products (BLE enabled SoC and MCUs ) out in market.

Nordic Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs, Espressif andST Micro are some of them.

Most all of the sensor ICs has digital communication channels like I2C, SPI or UART. Some of them will have direct analog output.

If you have a BLE+MCU solution, The same MCU which hosts and controls the stack of the BLE can be used to communicate to these sensors.

Let's look at BLE + MCU solutions .

nRF52840 from nordic semiconductor has a BLE + Cortex M4 CPU and a handful of peripherals like I2C, SPI, UART etc. You can easily develop what ever you want on these kind of platforms.

Like this there are many chips.(http://www.nordicsemi.com/-/media/Software-and-other-downloads/Product-Briefs/nRF52840-product-brief.pdf?la=en&hash=CE0F… )

esp32 from espressif - https://www.espressif.com/en/products/hardware/esp32/overview

Bluegecko series of BLE solutions from Silicon Labs : https://www.silabs.com/products/wireless/bluetooth/blue-gecko-bluetooth-smart-socs

CC2642 from TI : CC2642R SimpleLink Bluetooth Low Energy wireless MCU | TI.com

BlueNRG series from STM : https://www.st.com/en/wireless-transceivers-mcus-and-modules/bluetooth-bluetooth-low-energy.html#overview

All of these companies has cheap development/demonstration boards with lot of sensors enabled.

Thunderbird Sense 2 is one of my favorite : https://www.silabs.com/products/development-tools/thunderboard/thunderboard-sense-two-kit

This small piece of PCB has a handfull of sensors integrated to it. This will give you an idea of how to develop your own designs.

Texas Instruments  (TI) has sensor tag : CC2650 SensorTag User's Guide - Texas Instruments Wiki  (CC2650 based solution)

Please let me know if you want any help.

Regards,

Aswin

THANK YOU!

I think this is pretty much what I'm looking for. Again, I don't have a whole lot of hardware background so I may be just asking the wrong questions. At any rate, I'll look these all over today but... my assumption is that most of these boards come with some sort of pin connections that you attach a sensor to (light, humidity, gas, etc.) and then a software suite that you use to read the data from the sensor and transmit it via BLE? Is that about right? I'm sure I'll have more questions after reading the links you sent but in the mean time thanks again for your detailed reply!

Hi,

Let me give you an example.

Consider you want to make a BLE enabled humidity sensor.

DHT11 is one of the cheapest and commonly available humidity sensor in the market.

This sensor communicate using single wire serial communication.  Find more info her : https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=16&ved=2ahUKEwi59fKf_b3jAhUKPY8KHYFUAd4QFjAPegQIBBAC&url=h…

take a thunderboard sense2:

Connect any of the GPIO (Gneral purpose Input Output). To the pin 2 of DHT11. Connect 3V3 to the VCC pin (pin 1) and ground to Pin GND(pin4).

Now you need to generate/detect "1" and "0" of required duration on the GPIO pin inorder to retrieve information from the sensor.

I will be writing an article how to communicate with DHT11 using GPIO very soon. That will give you a clear understanding of these.

Regards,

Aswin

Got it (and thanks again!). I don't know if you looked at the software I've been working on but basically I'd hoped to find a company that already manufactured a simple (and inexpensive) line of sensors that I could integrate into my platform. The idea being that users could order a few hubs and whatever sensors they needed ala carte and be able to build a lot of simpler IoT applications very quickly and without doing a lot (or any) actual development. I haven't really found anyone doing that though so I'm just exploring getting them built myself. From your links I was especially happy to see a few boards that are already available with long range ble which I think could make ble a much more viable solution for a lot of applications. Of course for the time being that would require a dongle on the Pi, but where long range is important that's probably not a big extra.

At any rate, two things... (1) where (and roughly when) will your article be published? I look forward to it, and (2) is there a forum or place that you might suggest that I check out to find companies that might be in a position to build a set of sensors for me?

Thanks again for your valuable input!

Hi,

   I just did a quick google search and found some candidates.

https://www.texim-europe.com/news/831

https://www.silabs.com/products/development-tools/sensors/environmental-biometric-sensor-puck-starter-kit

https://switches-sensors.zf.com/bluetooth-low-energy-5-0/

One thing you have to make sure is that your software supports custom characteristics over BLE GATT.

Some of these sensors may have a custom characteristics to send the sensor data.

Answering your first question :

I will be writing blogs here and on  my LinkedIn, I will update you when I post articles on this topic.

You can connect with me through my LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/aswinvenu/

Regards,

Aswin

Hi,

   I just did a quick google search and found some candidates.

https://www.texim-europe.com/news/831

https://www.silabs.com/products/development-tools/sensors/environmental-biometric-sensor-puck-starter-kit

https://switches-sensors.zf.com/bluetooth-low-energy-5-0/

One thing you have to make sure is that your software supports custom characteristics over BLE GATT.

Some of these sensors may have a custom characteristics to send the sensor data.

Answering your first question :

I will be writing blogs here and on  my LinkedIn, I will update you when I post articles on this topic.

You can connect with me through my LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/aswinvenu/

Regards,

Aswin

Yeah, thanks, I've actually had some cursory conversations with a few companies that I'd found on the internet but had just received wildly varying information / price quotes. I was just thinking maybe you knew of some specific companies. I'll do a bit more research, though your posts have been tremendously helpful! I'll watch for your blogs and thanks again for the help...