5. What’s Next?

5.1. Conclusion

What have we covered in this tutorial?

  • Bluetooth Low Energy uses 40 different frequency channels (PHY channels), separated by 2 MHz. Three of these channels (channels 37, 38, and 39) are called Primary Advertisement Channels. The advertising events occurs at regular intervals, see Changing the Advertising Interval.

Note

The advertising packet is called a primary advert packet in Bluetooth 5.0. The Bluetooth spec (Vol 6, Part B, section 1.4) provides more details about Advertising extensions.

  • There are four advertising types: Non-connectable, Connectable Directed, Connectable Undirected, and Scannable Undirected.

  • Advertising packets transmit information about the device and its capabilities, such as the Bluetooth Device Address, Device Name or the preferred Connection Parameters of the device. If additional data are needed, they can be requested with a Scan Request, if the device supports this.

  • Advertising data or intervals are easily configurable through the appropriate SDK functions.

  • Dialog Semiconductor’s SmartSnippets Toolbox offers a complete suite of development tools, such as the Power Profiler, which can be used to verify and measure the energy consumption and timing of events.

5.2. Further Reading

This tutorial is intended to be used as a quick introduction to BLE advertising. It is a good place to start learning about BLE and how to use the different advertising API functions. This tutorial doesn’t cover all the advertising concepts in detail. The following links provide more detailed information:

  • DA14531 ibeacon Software example showing how to implement an iBeacon on the DA1453x.

  • Bluetooth Low Energy core specifications by Bluetooth SIG, which are the normative texts of how BLE devices should operate with other devices.