March 7 Bluetooth LE Sessions at ITP

Bluetooth LE: What’s the Deal?

Bluetooth 4.0, aka Bluetooth Low Energy, aka Bluetooth Smart, holds a lot of promise for connected devices, but it’s not as friendly as Bluetooth 2.0. What’s a service? What’s a characteristic? What’s GAP, GATT, and why do I need to know? How does iBeacon play into this? In this half-day workshop, Don Coleman will introduce the concepts behind Bluetooth LE and show working examples using libraries for node.js, Cordova, and some programmable Arduino-compatible modules using the Nordic Bluetooth LE radios.

* The first session will be an explanation of Bluetooth LE with lots of questions and answers.

* In the second session, we’ll start to program in node.js and Cordova. We’ll talk about the differences between iOS and Android

* In the final session, we’ll look at some Arduino-compatible hardware modules for Bluetooth LE. We’ll have a few RedBear Labs BLE Nanos and some RFduinos on hand for people to share, or bring your own.

What you’ll need for these sessions:

Session 1 (noon - 1PM): an interest in Bluetooth LE.

Session 2 (1:30 - 3:00): a laptop pre-loaded with node.js and a Cordova development environment set up for Android or iOS: http://itp.nyu.edu/~sve204/alwaysonalwaysconnected_spring15/week1.html

Session 3 (3:30 - 5): a laptop pre-loaded with Arduino 1.6.0, the RedBear and RFDuino libraries, and Sandeep Mistry’s arduino-BLEperipheral library. See these instructions: https://github.com/tigoe/BluetoothLE-Examples/tree/master/arduinoBLEperipheral