With this tutorial you use the Arduino or Genuino 101’s onboard Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) capabilities to turn on and of the LED connected to Pin 13 from a smartphone or tablet. You create a LED service and keep reading the BLE central, looking for a writing event of the characteristic associated with the LED you want to control. This tutorial is similar to the Callback LED where the change is managed by polling and callback functions. The values are sent using nRF Master Control Panel (BLE) app, available for Android and iOS.
image developed using Fritzing.
CurieBLE.h is the library that gives access to all the parameters, features and functions of the BLE module of the 101 board. With Bluetooth Low Energy it is possible to connect to and communicate with smartphones, tablets and peripherals that support this standard. In this tutorial it is used to establish a connection with a control application on the smartphone and get the value used to turn on or off a LED.
None
To drive the onboard LED of Arduino or Genuino 101, you need the nRF Master Control Panel (BLE) for Android and iOS. Launch it and do a SCAN. You should find the LED tab with a connect button.
Tap on connect to open the following screen, where you find the description of our BLE service offered by the 101 board. The unknown service has a UUID 19B10000-E8F2-537E-4F6C-D104768A1214 and it is set by the BLEService ledService("19B10000-E8F2-537E-4F6C-D104768A1214");
statement at the beginning of the sketch.
Tap the Unknown Service to open up its characteristic, as shown below. It includes properties that can be written with a Write Request. you also find two icons on the right of the Unknow Characteristic. The arrow pointing down means read, the other means write.
Tap the arrow pointing up to open the Write value popup, then set the data type to UINT 8
Now tap on the line to write your chosen value (either "0" or "1"). As soon as you tap on send the value is sent to the 101 board and the LED instantly changes accordingly.
In this sketch you use the setup() to initialise and configure the BLE peripheral. You start setting device name to LED, and configuring service UUID:
blePeripheral.setLocalName("LED");
blePeripheral.setAdvertisedServiceUuid(ledService.uuid());
Then you configure the BLE service, and add switch characteristics (which is used to control the LED):
blePeripheral.addAttribute(ledService);
blePeripheral.addAttribute(switchCharacteristic);
You set switch characteristics value to 0 (default – LED off):
switchCharacteristic.setValue(0);
And finally you begin advertising the BLE service that was set up in the previous steps:
blePeripheral.begin();
In the loop() you check the connection with a BLE central and if connected you check if switch characteristic was written, and if so you read its value and set the LED state accordingly.
Last revision 2016/04/05