Developing BLE Host Applications with Zephyr

Bluetooth Low Energy, commonly abbreviated as BLE, is a well-known wireless communication technology aimed at low-power applications. It divides devices into two categories: low-cost, potentially high volume, battery constrained peripheral devices such as head phones or heart rate monitors, and comparatively more powerful and less constrained central devices, such as smartphones and notebooks.

The Zephyr Project has supported developing BLE peripheral applications for a long time. But it may not be well known that it also supports BLE host applications, or central devices as the standard calls them. In his talk, Florian will take a look at how we can develop BLE host applications using Zephyr. After a (very) short introduction to the BLE protocol stack, he will delve into Zephyr's Bluetooth API and more importantly talk about the pitfalls he encountered while getting his feet wet with Zephyr. On the practical side, this talk will look into how BLE applications remain portabile between boards by different vendors, and how the many BLE-enabled emulators and simulators provided by Zephyr can be used for quicker development and testing.

In this talk you will learn about:

• the basics of the BLE protocols
• the Zephyr Bluetooth API and its pitfalls
• how portable Zephyr applications using BLE are
• how you can utilize the Zephyr emulators and simulators for BLE development