LightBlue Resources Articles

BLE

The Ultimate Guide to Android Bluetooth Low Energy

By: Chee Yi Ong

Originally published on May 15, 2020, and updated on April 17, 2024. What's been updated: This ultimate guide and its companion code repository now support compileSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion 34 (Android 14). The APIs used in this guide are from the android.bluetooth package, and not from the very similarly-named androidx.bluetooth package which is still in alpha as of the time of writing. The approaches detailed in this guide…

BLE

BLE Connectivity Architecture: The Ultimate Guide

By: Alec Letourneau

Introduction Building your first connected product is no easy task. There are many wireless networking protocols, each with its benefits and tradeoffs. However, if you're interested in widespread support, including iOS or Android devices…

Embedded

Nordic nRF52840: Is Rust a Good Fit for Embedded Applications?

By: Henry Anfang

C has been the language for microcontroller embedded development for decades. It’s definitely a good fit for low-level programming, but C has some features that make certain classes of errors more likely, such as memory errors. Rust is a more…

BLE

BLE Security: Where to Begin When Creating a Connected System

By: Ryan Kornetzke

Whether it’s your run-of-the-mill email phishing attack from a Nigerian prince, or a corporate scale data breach that leaks millions of people’s identifying information, all of us can probably recall a time where we’ve been the target of a…

BLE

BLE Sniffers: Debugging and when you may need to upgrade

By: Alec Werning

What is a Bluetooth analyzer? And why you may need one. Bluetooth protocol analyzers, also known as Bluetooth sniffers, are devices that capture and inspect radio transmissions on frequencies defined by Bluetooth specifications. Bluetooth…

BLE

The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your BLE Connection

By: Bret Hassler

Introduction One of the core aspects of designing a BLE application is determining how connections will be managed. There’s more to it than simply starting a connection whenever the devices should communicate. You must consider the…

BLE

Architecting iOS and Android Apps for IoT BLE Systems

By: Gretchen Walker

When you buy a Fitbit, you’re not just paying for the wearable hardware. You’re buying a key that unlocks access to a greater integrated system. Before you can even start using the device, you must first download the app, pair it with your…

Mobile Apps

Mastering all 5 Kotlin Scope Functions

By: Chee Yi Ong

It should come as no surprise that our Android team here at Punch Through loves Kotlin, and that we strive to write idiomatic Kotlin, taking advantage of its unique language features whenever possible. Some common questions we get from newer team…

BLE

How to Delete Bonds with the Nordic nRF5 SDK

By: Amanda Christiansen

When we talk about Bluetooth-connected devices, an inherent part of that discussion is bond management. Bond management consists of storing and deleting information about a paired device so that the pairing process between two authenticated devices…

BLE

Maximizing BLE Throughput Part 4: Everything You Need to Know

By: Ashish Derhgawen

Welcome to part 4 of the “Maximizing BLE Throughput” blog post series! This blog post will provide the key takeaways from our previous 3 posts and also bring us up-to-date with the latest BLE spec (such as 2M PHY). Update: Please check out…

Punch Through Office where engineers use rx and delegate programming on iOS

Mobile Apps

Using Rx vs Delegates with CoreBluetooth

By: Julian Hays

Reactive (or “Rx”) style programming is quickly becoming a popular design pattern in mobile development. What is it, and how does it compare to the tried-and-true delegation pattern? Should you be using Rx on your next mobile project? Follow…

Ultimate Guide to Apple's Core Bluetooth library

BLE

The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Core Bluetooth

By: Gretchen Walker

This article assumes you know the very basics of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and iOS programming (including the delegation pattern for asynchronous calls common to many iOS native APIs), and is meant as a comprehensive guide to the ins and outs of…

Engineer working on Human Interface Devices in office

Mobile Apps

How iOS and Android Handle Connections with BLE Human Interface Devices

By: Alec Letourneau

iOS and Android’s Bluetooth APIs allow apps to communicate with BLE devices. The API simplifies the way apps implement BLE and allows multiple apps to use BLE at the same time, but it also introduces many undocumented behaviors. Unfortunately,…

Mobile Apps

Unit Testing Android BLE Code with RxAndroidBle

By: Chee Yi Ong

In this post, we look at what RxAndroidBle offers as far as unit testing is concerned, and we’ll also walk through a case study of unit testing a common BLE business logic. Seasoned Android developers will no doubt have heard of RxJava—a…

LightBlue®

How to Use LightBlue®: The Go-To BLE Development Tool

By: Gretchen Walker

We at Punch Through first began developing LightBlue® for iOS back in 2012 out of internal necessity. We were a young company carving out a determined niche in the exciting new world of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the revolutionary new iteration…

Mobile Apps

Mobile Developer’s Advice for Implementing Device Firmware Updates

By: Julian Hays

When developing mobile apps for connected devices, handling device firmware updates (DFU) is a common task we need to tackle. Device firmware updating is the process of installing new programming onto an embedded device. By leveraging BLE…

BLE

Creating a BLE Peripheral with BlueZ

By: Andy Lee

While I’m fairly well-versed in working with BLE on an embedded device, I have so far had little experience with using BLE at a higher level. To help remedy this, I underwent the task of creating a BLE peripheral running a GATT server on a…

Engineers meeting about Kotlin language features

Mobile Apps

Our 5 Favorite Kotlin Features

By: Chee Yi Ong

When Swift was released by Apple for iOS developers, Android developers were in awe and envious of this modern programming language that provides null-safety and an expressive yet concise syntax. Thankfully, the Android Studio 3.0 release in 2017…

Engineer working with Android Studio in office

Mobile Apps

Boost Productivity with 4 Android Studio Tips

By: Ashish Derhgawen

For those of us writing Android apps for a living, Android Studio is our bread and butter. Optimizing Android Studio will make your development experience both enjoyable and productive. In this blog post, I will share some tips to improve build…

Mobile Apps

What to Consider Before Building a Mobile Medical App

By: Alec Letourneau

So, you want to build a mobile app for use in medical or health applications and believe that it may fall under government regulations? Getting regulatory approval is no small task, but focusing on building a great product will significantly…

BLE

How Apple and Google’s Bluetooth Contact Tracing Framework Actually Works

By: Chee Yi Ong

The COVID-19 pandemic affects us all, with public life seeing disruptions at an unprecedented scale. To help curb the spread of the disease, Apple and Google have announced a joint effort to develop a contact tracing framework with a heavy focus on…

Mobile Apps

Why Re-Signing iOS Apps is Better than Recompiling

By: Alec Letourneau

Re-signing iOS apps allows you to open your app after it’s been built and modify everything except the application code. The main reason to use this process is to avoid recompiling an app and risking the introduction of unintended changes.…

LightBlue®

What’s new in LightBlue® Android v1.6.0 and iOS v3.1.1

By: Chee Yi Ong

LightBlue® Android v1.6.0 Hello BLE fans! We've been hard at work implementing some of your most highly requested features over the past couple of months for LightBlue® Android, and we're excited to share these changes with you. The version…

engineers sitting discussing Apple's Swift Package Manager

Mobile Apps

How to Use Apple’s Swift Package Manager

By: Julian Hays

A package manager, also sometimes referred to as a dependency manager, is a tool that facilitates installing, updating, and configuring other code packages to make them available within your software. Many iOS developers will already be very…

Engineer learning about Android Debug Bridge

Mobile Apps

How to Set Up Wireless Debugging with Android Debug Bridge

By: Ashish Derhgawen

Writing apps for Android devices can often be challenging enough as it is. Having to deal with different USB cables (or cables that don’t work) just adds to the struggle. It wasn't until recently that I found you could avoid a lot of cable issues…

Team of engineers learning about background Bluetooth

Mobile Apps

Leveraging Background Bluetooth for a Great User Experience

By: Alec Letourneau

One of the most important things that users want when using a connected product is to be able to put its app in a folder and forget about it, trusting that it’ll work. Designing apps with this capability goes far beyond a product’s physical…

Punch Through team learning about 2M PHY

BLE

Bluetooth PHY – How it Works and How to Leverage it

By: Henry Anfang

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless communication protocol. As with other communication protocols, BLE uses a layered design, where each layer is associated with a specific aspect of the protocol. Interlayer interaction is restricted and…

BLE

Bluetooth Low Energy Serial: A Valid Design Strategy?

By: Alec Letourneau

At some point in developing a connected product for BLE, you may have wondered, "Where is the serial profile?" Maybe you assumed that you missed it while scrolling through the long lists of profiles on the Bluetooth SIG’s website. Or, maybe you…

Group of Punch Through team members who recommend Android App Tools and Patterns

Mobile Apps

Our Preferred Android Development Tools and Patterns

By: Chee Yi Ong

At Punch Through, we work on both greenfield and legacy app projects for our clients. For greenfield Android projects, we generally try to conform to a modern, well-documented, and well-supported architectural pattern that’s easy to follow. The…

Python coding language on computer screen used to test Bluetooth Low Energy peripheral

BLE

Testing Bluetooth Low Energy Peripherals using a Python Script

By: Ashish Derhgawen

When developing a Bluetooth Low Energy peripheral, it’s often useful to have an app that can connect to and test the peripheral to ensure it’s working as expected. If, however, you don’t already have a companion app for the device, you’d…

Computer coding with Android and Bluetooth symbol - Android BLE tips

Mobile Apps

4 Tips to Make Android BLE Actually Work

By: Chee Yi Ong

Android development is hard, and it's no thanks to its relatively fragmented ecosystem and having a million OEM’s out there. Throw BLE—which is extremely hardware and Bluetooth spec. dependent!—into the mix and the platform's behavior becomes…

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LightBlue®

Introducing Cloud Connect for LightBlue® Explorer

By: Chee Yi Ong

Punch Through Design is proud to announce Cloud Connect: an exciting new feature for LightBlue®, the leading BLE debug and development tool. Cloud Connect enables users to quickly and easily send data received from your BLE devices via…

LightBlue®

Setting up Adafruit IO with LightBlue® Cloud Connect

By: Chee Yi Ong

LightBlue has the ability to send data received from your BLE devices via indication or notification to Adafruit's IO platform. You'll be prompted to provide some information for your Adafruit IO set up from within LightBlue® when you opt to…

LightBlue®

Introducing LightBlue® Explorer for Android

By: Chee Yi Ong

LightBlue Explorer for iOS has been downloaded by over 600,000 people over the years and is trusted by industrial experts and enthusiasts alike. What began as a project to simplify BLE development internally blossomed into an app that has helped…

LightBlue®

Setting up AWS IoT with LightBlue® Cloud Connect

By: Chee Yi Ong

LightBlue® Explorer has the ability to send data received from your BLE devices via indication or notification to AWS's Internet of Things (IoT) platform.You'll be prompted to provide some information for your AWS IoT set up from within…

BLE

Testing Bluetooth Low Energy Devices

By: Punch Through

Bluetooth Low Energy is a new Bluetooth standard that is exciting for a couple reasons- it enables very low power battery applications, and it further opens the smartphone accessory market. LightBlue allows you to test and simulate Bluetooth Low…

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