What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is Bluetooth Low Energy, introduces the reader to Bluetooth Low Energy and its various building blocks—Profiles, Services, Characteristics, and Descriptors.

?Chapter 2, Setting Up, sets up the development environment to execute the Android and iOS code samples included in the book.

Chapter 3, Building a Service Explorer App, solidifies our understanding of the concepts introduced in the first chapter by building a Service Explorer app that can be used to explore services on any Bluetooth Low Energy device. We eventually use the same app to explore services on a fitness tracker, read heart rate data, and upload it to a remote Firebase backend.

Chapter 4, Designing a Personal Tracking System, focuses on a key concept in IoT, that is, proximity. We design a Personal Tracker app using an iTag. The app uses the RSSI received from an iTag to approximate the distance between the app-hosting device and the iTag.

Chapter 5, Beacons with Raspberry Pi, introduces the reader to one of the key cornerstones of IoT, that is, Beacons, and the two primary Beacon protocols—Eddystone and iBeacon. In addition, we also configure a Raspberry Pi to be used as an Eddystone Beacon and write an Android and iOS app to detect it.

Chapter 6, Weather Monitoring Using BLE in Warehouses, shows you how to combine the knowledge that you gained in the previous chapters and address a real-life problem revolving around BLE and IoT. We introduce a new sensor type and build a Weather Monitoring app using that sensor.

Chapter 7, Going Further, discusses the future of BLE and IoT by introducing the reader to various use cases and products based on Bluetooth Low Energy, that are already available or will become available on the consumer market in the future.