A while a go I started to create a first PCB design for a Bluetooth Low Energy Microcell, which should be used to setup an indoor localization system. The PCB has been manufactured in december and I assembled it during the xmas holidays. Using the iBLE application, which is a generic BLE explorer app and still under development, I can discover the macrocells and read their RSSI. There is still some work to do in order to locate an iPhone4S indoors, but I wanted to share the progress of this project with anybody who is interested.

As I finished my first reflow soldered hardware project, I added a short story covering the assembly of the Bluetooth RFID Tagreader.

Today I picked up a “Bluegiga BLE112 Bluetooth® 4.0 single mode Development Kit” from my Distributor KELAG to start BLE Development. The iBLE App which is currently under development was able to see the development kit, which has a Thermometer Demo installed by default. The combination of the development kit, my new iPhone4S, the knowledge on creating PCBs and Reflow soldering will result in some nice BLE Peripherals soon. I will add those here on the blog as they are finished.

A while ago I ordered the “Big Beta-Reflow-Kit” from Beta-Layout to move to reflow soldering my hardware prototypes instead of soldering SMD parts by hand. Today I successfully soldered the SMD Test-Board which is part of the kit. Since I ordered the Reflow-Controller as well, the controller needed to be “learned” which was as easy to do as the soldering. Adding the solder paste was easier than expected. Placing the SMD parts, especially the 0603 parts, a little tricky since I had too much coffee already and my hands were shaking.

After some designing I finished a breakout board for the BlueGiga BLE112 Module. It will be plugged into the main sensor board which is still under development.

On November 16th I visited BlueGiga at the Medica Exhibition in Düsseldorf Germany. Thank you to Janne and Enrico for the demo of the new BLE112 evaluation board and the interesting discussions on Bluetooth Low Energy. It was the first time I was able to see the evaluation board in real life. Moreover I had a chance to test my iBLE iOS App, which is a Bluetooth Low Energy explorer App running on the iPhone4S.

The initial PCB design was finished on October 17th, but since it takes some time to produce and ship it I finally received it yesterday. After tweaking some design faults with isolated copper wire I got the RFID Reader working after about three hours. Well the firmware was already written and the WT12 configuration just needed to be downloaded to the module. After fixing, soldering, measuring voltages, flashing firmwares here is the final assembled “Bluetooth RFID Tagreader”.

After some Bluetooth RFID Reader prototypes I created a new board which is designed to fit into an enclosure which will be printed by a 3D print service. The Reader can be connected to iOS Devices and sends the UID of a MIFARE Tag as text string into any iOS app which is capable of handling texts. A tactile switch is added to the reader as well, in order to unhide/hide the on board keyboard on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

I ordered a CC2540 Mini Development from Texas Instruments on monday, to start playing around with BLE technology. I hope to get the TI kit work with the BLE112 modules from Bluegiga. Since the BlueGiga chip is using the same chip and even the original TI programmer is part of the BlueGiga kit, I hope this will be not a big deal. As you can read in my previous post about the LLE112 modules, I now have some test devices to play with.

I just received two BlueGiga BLE112 modules from our swiss distributor KELAG AGfor initial testing. More information about the module can found at the BlueGiga BLE112 product pages.