After creating the BLE Shield for Arduino it is time to create some projects with it to show you what can be done using the shield. Now it is time to create a simple RFID Tag Reader using the BLE Shield. In order to stack such a device together, I grabbed the following out of my “Arduino Box”: 1 x Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V 1 x Adafruit PN532 NFC/RFID Controller Shield for Arduino 1 x Seeddstudio Solar Charger Shield v0.

Update 2012-07-16: There are no more shields available! Hello Arduino users in Zurich, as I already mentioned during my IoT Talk las week, I want to start a BLE Shield Beta Test in Zurich. Why only Zurich? Well the Beta test will focus in hard- and firmware tests. If the firmware needs to be adjusted I can do this and reflash the Shields of the testers while meeting them for a beer somewhere in town.

The BLE Shield for Arduino presentation slides of the yesterdays speech I held at the IoT/ZH Meetup are online now. You can download the slides as single PDF file using this link: http://www.mkroll.mobi/BLE-Shield-4-Arduino-Presentation/BLE-Shield-4-Arduino.pdf As I mentioned during the talk, I’m looking for beta testers in Zurich which will be given a BLE Shield just for the cost of the parts in order to create a solid firmware. Why only Zurich? Well since it is easier to reflash the shield with a new firmware if we encounter issues during the beta test phase.

I ended the preorder survey, since I think the response I got from the Octopus Survey was amazing. Spending a little time with Numbers, I created this chart to give you an impression where the preorders came from: I had to kick some preorders out, since there was no personal data added. I don’t wanted to use this Info to spam you, but to get an impression, where the demand comes from and send you a personal email, once the Shield is available and thank you for the participation in the survey.

After some time I finally managed to look at license types, and I’ve chosen the same licenses as the Arduino boards are licensed. The Eagle files (Board and Schematic) are licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 and the firmware under LGPL. Please modify the PCB and the firmware as you like and please share your ideas, changes and additions here on my blog. I hope to give you all who demanded the sources and PCB files a better insight of what is happening in the firmware of the shield and show you that it is not a kind of rocket science behind it.

The Kickstarter project “tōd:Connect Real World Actions to Mobile Devices and the Web” is now online, and I recommend all readers of my blog to visit the Kickstarter.com pages since I’m involved in this project as well. For people who were interested in the location micro cells I created as my first BLE hardware can get some tōd’s since they can offer similar functionality without need to change the firmware. The location microcells were just a feasibility study on how to create a small hardware to communicate with an iPhone4S and are now discontinued after tōd has been announced.

After spending some time on hardware- and software development I finally finished a first working prototype of an Arduino Bluetooth Low Energy Shield. A detailed story about the shield shown below can be found in the Hardware Section or directly using this link: http://www.mkroll.mobi/?page_id=386 Read what others are writing about the BLE Shield: http://blog.makezine.com/2012/03/19/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://transalchemy.com/2012/03/19/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://houseofmods.com/2012/03/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://high-technology.info/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://pricegadgetreviews.com/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://www.itclips.net/2012/03/20/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://dev.squarecows.com/2012/03/19/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/

Finally I managed to finalize this project with a Video Podcast showing you how to pair the RFID-Reader with an iPhone and Tag an ISO14443A tag. Enjoy the video!

The Bluetooth RFID Reader pages in the hardware section has been updated now. I finally added pictures of the RFID Reader in a plastic enclosure printed by shapeways.com to the post. I’m currently preparing a short demo video showing the RFID reader connected to the iPhone in action.

Hello everyone, Today I found an old article summarizing my Ph.D. thesis work which is in german. The title of the article is “Körperwelten auf die Festplatte gebannt” and can be downloaded as PDF document from the following link: http://www.vmk-verlag.de/data/108_4.pdf If you are interested in more details concerning the project please drop me a line. Cheers, Michael.