Bluetooth Powered Monitoring and Control

Now shipping in volumes in excess of 5 million devices a week, Bluetooth’s success in consumer devices opens up a host of novel monitoring and control applications.

Bluetooth mobile phones, PDAs and laptops provide an opportunity to enable their users to monitor/control Bluetooth-enabled industrial or consumer devices. The key points for realising this are:

• Reuse existing functionality (such as a mobile phone's built-in ability to send/receive files, or run Bluetooth Java applications)
• Provide low-cost ways of adding Bluetooth control interfaces to existing devices
• Employ simple hardware interfaces when upgrading existing devices to be Bluetooth controllable

By way of example, Cambridge Consultants developed a Bluetooth-enabled electricity meter for leading utility metering company, Actaris.

We developed a solution based on a single-chip Bluetooth implementation. The meter reading was taken using the Bluetooth 'Object Push' profile - where the reading is transferred to the phone in a text file. Alternatively, a Bluetooth-enabled laptop or PDA could be used to monitor the meter reading in real-time.

This example illustrates how Bluetooth can easily be used for this type of novel application:

• Using single-chip Bluetooth keeps the add-on cost low
• Simple hardware interfacing (e.g. UART, PIO, SPI) between the single-chip and the device keeps development costs low
• Reusing consumer devices as ‘controllers’ provides a ‘no-cost’ and widely available control device.

This project, and many others, have been realised in very short timescales using our single-chip Bluetooth software toolkit - "xIDE for Interface Express". For more information, download the PDF file (left).