STMicroelectronics' SDK Supports Bluetooth Mesh Networking
September 28, 2017
According to STMicroelectronics, the company is empowering the next wave of control-by-phone innovation with new software for creating smart objects that connect using the latest Bluetooth wireless networking features. The latest Bluetooth spec, version 5 standardizes mesh networking by connecting large numbers of devices that can communicate either among themselves or directly with mobile phones. This permits easier control of smart lighting, general building automation, and other IoT applications, such as environmental sensing, industrial monitoring, and asset tracking.
ST’s BlueNRG-MESH Software Development Kit (SDK) enables creation of networked devices and the smartphone apps needed to control them. It’s a three-part SDK that provides two app-developer packages for Android and iOS, and the embedded-development software for building smart objects such as light fittings and sensors. Together, these three packages provide the software building blocks engineers need to get their applications running with ST’s BlueNRG mesh-ready Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) ICs.
The BlueNRG-MESH SDK supports Bluetooth Mesh network nodes using either the BlueNRG-1 or BlueNRG-2 complete BLE SoCs or the BlueNRG-MS BLE radio IC. The embedded SDK contains driver-level software including hardware abstraction layer and board support packages, middleware including the BlueNRG-Mesh library and BlueNRG core stack, and sample sensing and LED-lighting application code. The Android and iOS packages provide the core stack and sample applications to help develop smartphone apps for end users to configure and control devices in the network.