About IOT(1) BLE Overview

About IOT(1) BLE Overview

In this article, I would like to discuss the connection between the real world and the IT world. IT technology that deals with things, rather than the usual IT technology that deals with people, is called IOT (Internet Of Things). The purpose of this technology is not only to connect people and things, but also to create value by connecting things and things. In terms of business, IOT-related ventures such as soracom and treasure data were born a while ago in Japan and showed a lot of excitement, but even now, they don’t seem to have grown to such a large scale.

I think one of the reasons for this is that things themselves do not pay for themselves, the mechanism for paying for things becomes complicated when the owner of the thing and the user who receives the benefit are different, and it is difficult to find a way to amortize the cost of installing the hardware called IOT.

Wireless technology is most often used as a means of connecting IOT devices to ICT. Its strength is that it can be easily installed anywhere without wiring, but it also has some issues to be considered such as noise resistance, limitation of the amount of data that can be sent at a time, and securing a power source.

In this article, we will discuss the connection to BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), one of the short-range wireless communication technologies. BLE is one of the extended specifications of Bluetooth, and as the name suggests, it is characterized by its ability to communicate at extremely low power. (Depending on the communication situation, it can be operated for several years with a single button battery.)

However, some frequency bands called ISM (industry science and medical) bands can be used without a license worldwide, and the 2.45 GHz frequency used by BLE can be used without a license using this frequency band. The 2.45GHz frequency band used by BLE is also available for unlicensed use.

Other features include low power consumption, which reduces the transmission distance to about 5 meters, and a data transmission speed of 1 Mbps (10 kbps for practical use).

There are two types of BLE specifications: one is the “protocol,” which includes definitions used by all BLE devices, such as pairing implementation between devices, data transmission and reception methods, and hardware definitions such as communication frequency definition and control, and the other is called the “profile,” whose definitions vary depending on the device.

Communication with BLE involves the exchange of data with the server side in accordance with these specifications.

In the next article, I will show an example of specific communication using HTML and Javascript.