BLEES

Hardware

The BLEES hardware is a small, once inch round sensor board that mounts onto a Squall BLE sensor tag. The board currently has four sensors:

1. Temperature and Humidity (Si7021)
2. Pressure (LPS331AP)
3. Light (TSL2561)
4. Accelerometer (ADXL362)

The BLEES hardware is located in the hardware directory, where you can find the Eagle design files.

Software

The Squall uses the software located in the software directory. Follow the directions in the [nrf5x-base Readme] (http://github.com/lab11/nrf5x-base#program-a-nrf51822) to get your machine set up to build and flash the Squall.

The primary application is software/apps/blees. This application samples the sensors and makes this data available as both broadcast advertisements and the Environmental Sensing Service for a connected device.

Data Reference

Advertisement data

BLEES transmits advertisements every 1000 ms containing application data. Here's a useful BLE Advertisement primer. The advertisements come in two forms: environmental data and eddystone. Advertisements alternate between the two evenly.

The environmental data advertised is same data as is available through the environmental sensing service, but broadcast so several nearby devices can access it concurrently. The data includes, in order, four bytes for pressure, two bytes for humidity, two bytes for temperature, two bytes for light illuminance, and one byte for acceleration state. An example application that collects BLE advertisements from BLEES devices and displays the data can be found at data_collection/advertisements/blees_adv.js

Eddystone is a protocol for connecting BLE devices to Internet resources. BLEES advertises the URL of an application that can be interpreted by the Summon framework in order to automatically generate a user interface. (see next heading)

Environmental Sensing Service

BLEES is also connectable and supports the Environmental Sensing Service. While connected to, it continues to advertise, but only one connection at a time is allowed. The environmental sensing service is defined by the BLE SIG.

Summon App

Summon is a UI application for BLE devices. Rather than requiring every user to install a new app for every BLE device, Summon allows BLE devices to point to their own HTML/JS based interface and loads it in a single application. BLEES supports the summon architecture and provides a Summon application.

Cloning

To clone both this repository and the required submodules, clone with the --recursive option: git clone --recursive [email protected]:lab11/blees.git

Otherwise, you can initialize the submodule and keep submodules up to date by doing git submodule update --init --recursive

If you think all of this is ridiculous and git should just handle submodules automatically, use this: https://gist.github.com/brghena/fc4483a2df83c47660a5

Other Hardware

Included in this repo are:

Blink

Blink is a PIR sensor that is also based on Squall. Like BLEES, it supports Summon. The nRF51822 app is here.