Tag: bluetooth

Categories
Digital Healthcare

Reading Blood Oxygen Saturation (SpO2) and Pulse through MySignals / Arduino

The MySignals HW BLE v2 – eHealth and Medical IoT Development Platform for Arduino contains sensors that measure more than 20 biometric parameters. One of the most interesting is the Bluetooth LE SpO2 sensor. How to get started reading live data and visualizing it on the TFT display of the board?

What is the MySignals HW Kit?

The MySignals HW kit contains a shield that requires an Arduino Uno as base. In contrast to the (more expensive) MySignals SW kit, the HW kit is rather basic. Powering it up results in a white screen, instead of a nice interface on the screen. The rest is up to the software developer. As the development is based on Arduino, you need the latest version of the Arduino IDE.

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Categories
App Development Bluetooth Beacons Windows

Cross-Platform Universal Bluetooth Beacon Library Evolves

Universal Bluetooth Beacon Library

Thanks to the help of the new collaborator Chris Tacke, the Universal Bluetooth Beacon Library has evolved to its next level. Based on a modularized architecture, the library is now based on .NET Standard 1.3. Extensions provide the glue to the Bluetooth APIs of various platforms.

Currently, Windows 10 (UWP) and Android (Xamarin) are supported. The core library also works fine on iOS, Mac and Linux.

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Categories
App Development Bluetooth Beacons Windows

How to Read the Battery Level of Bluetooth LE Devices

Microsoft Surface Dial

At the Microsoft Build Tour in Vienna, I had the opportunity to present an enhanced version of the Bluetooth Beacon talk. With the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft released a massive update to the Bluetooth LE capabilities of the OS. This finally allows developers to use the full potential of modern Bluetooth scenarios, including sensors, wearables and beacons.

At Build 2017, Microsoft released three new sessions explaining the capabilities of the new APIs:

  1. Intro to Bluetooth LE Explorer
  2. Unpaired Bluetooth LE Device Connectivity
  3. Bluetooth GATT Server

Even though the sessions reference example code and blog posts that should have been released together with the session recordings, still none of that is available so far. That gave me the opportunity to explore the new APIs based on the short documentation overview page and the videos.

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Categories
App Development Bluetooth Beacons Windows

Bluetooth Beacon Interactor 2 for Windows 10

According to ABI research, 8.2 million Bluetooth Beacons have been shipped. In 2021, the yearly shipments will have increased to an astonishing number of 565 million beacons per year.

The Bluetooth Beacon Interactor for Windows 10 is a free & open source app for scanning your environment for Beacons. It was the first Bluetooth Beacon scanner app available for Windows 10 and works on PCs, smartphones and even the Microsoft HoloLens.

New Features in Version 2.0

The app has just received an update to version 2.0, which adds the two most requested features:

  • URLs in Eddystone URL frames are now clickable. You can directly open the web site linked to by Physical Web beacons.
  • Thanks to a community contribution by kobush, the app now also supports beacons compatible to Apple iBeacons / Proximity Beacons.

Download

You can download the source code of the Bluetooth Beacon Interactor and its base Universal Beacon Library at GitHub. If you would like to scan your surroundings for Bluetooth Beacons and analyze their contents, you can directly download the app from the Windows 10 App Store.

Categories
Bluetooth Beacons

How to Parse Bluetooth Beacons (iBeacon and Eddystone) with Arduino 101

Especially when working with Bluetooth Beacons like iBeacon or Eddystone, you will often want to use embedded hardware to create a low-cost, always running system. This short guide explains how to read Bluetooth Beacon messages using the Arduino 101 / Genuino 101 board.

The Arduino / Genuino 101 already includes a Bluetooth chipset and is based on the Intel Curie platform. You can use the same Arduino IDE as for all the other variants of the Arduino Board.

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