Bluetooth for smart LED fixtures

Bluetooth for smart LED fixtures

Make time this November for updating your LED ( LED high bay, retrofit strip, etc)

knowledge base. No travel? No problem. Plenty of opportunities lie ahead this month to do a digital download of all the latest advances — from SSL materials to plant science to light that hits the streets.

Bluetooth is including :

Bluetooth 5.1 introduced a major new feature for Bluetooth Low Energy; Direction Finding. This feature offers exciting new possibilities for accurate indoor positioning of assets and people in three-dimensional space.  Bluetooth 5.1 is the development direction of intelligent LED high bay and smart troffer lights.

Bluetooth® Low Energy provides low-cost, interoperable wireless connectivity to compact battery-operated applications. It is a wireless protocol operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, with up to 1.4 Mbps application throughput or up to 1,000 m range. The technology is highly effective, minimizing the energy needed to transfer data. It is secure, specifying features to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and privacy.

Bluetooth LE is now standardized in all smartphones, tablets, and laptops, in addition a wide range of other devices. It has support in iOS and Android, as well as macOS, Windows 10, and Linux.

Bluetooth 5 is the most important improvement of the Bluetooth standard since the introduction of Bluetooth LE in Bluetooth 4.0. The new features significantly enhance all applications and give life to applications that just weren't feasible before. The nRF52 Series SoCs are all Bluetooth 5.

The 2 Mbps mode increases application throughput, up to 1.4 Mbps, enabling streaming and high bandwidth applications. Compared to the 1 Mbps mode, it is much more energy effective, halving the amount of energy per bit, facilitating applications to last longer on the same size battery or have a smaller and cheaper battery.

Advertising Extensions revolutionizes the broadcasting capabilities of Bluetooth LE devices. Up to 8 times more advertising data can be included in an advertisement. Long Range connection establishment can be done directly. Advertisements can be chained together to broadcast larger advertising data sets.

Channel Selection Algorithm #2 (CSA #2) improves coexistence performance and robustness.

The Long Range model allows Bluetooth LE devices to communicate further apart and enables complete smart home coverage.

Bluetooth mesh is a state-of-the-art standard that extends the capabilities of Bluetooth to include large-scale networks, supported by the nRF52 Series. Leverage our qualified Bluetooth mesh stack and open source provisioning smartphone apps in your development. Our SoftDevices offers concurrent GATT operation with the Bluetooth mesh stack, providing a phone connectivity option. Bluetooth mesh is widely used for led smart high bay and smart troffer.

1.

Bluetooth 5 is the most significant advancement in the Bluetooth standard since the introduction of Bluetooth Low Energy in Bluetooth 4.0. It is taking Bluetooth LE to the next level and is making brand new use cases possible and improving existing ones.

There are four significant new features of Bluetooth 5:

A higher bit rate of 2 Mbps.

A long-range mode with better sensitivity at two new lower bit rates of 500 kbps and 125 kbps.

An 8 x improvement in broadcast capability with advertising extensions.

An improved channel selection algorithm (CSA #2) enables improved channel coordination and coexistence efficiency with other Bluetooth and non-Bluetooth traffic.

The nRF52 Series multiprotocol SoCs are high performance that supports Bluetooth 5. The nRF52840 supports all new features of Bluetooth 5, whilst the other members support all Bluetooth 5 features with the exception of the long-range modes. The nRF52 Series family of devices cover baseline through general-purpose up to highly sophisticated Bluetooth 5 devices.  All devices in the family are supported by qualified, high performance, production-grade software stacks. Together they offer an unparalleled development option for creating products with Bluetooth 5.

2.

Bluetooth Direction Finding is the major feature of the Bluetooth 5.1 Core specification. It is designed to enhance location services were previously only signal strength based technology has been used with received signal strength indication (RSSI).

Bluetooth Direction Finding will offer new and improved use cases for real-time location systems (RTLS) for asset tracking in a wide range of scenarios from logistics and warehousing to value asset security in hospitals and factories. It also brings added user experiences in proximity-based scenarios for consumer awareness and contextual information.

Bluetooth Direction Finding can be used to detect location in either 2D or 3D dependent on the complexity of its implementation.

The angle of arrival and angle of departure

Bluetooth Direction Finding is based around the two key concepts of the angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD). This makes use of the angular phase-shifts that occur between antennas as they receive (AoA) or transmit (AoD) RF signals.

With the use of antenna arrays at either side of the communication link phase shift data can be determined and from this, location can be calculated.

Whether AoA or AoD is chosen for use depends much on the use case, both can be used effectively, but in certain circumstances, one or the other will be more suitable given a range of considerations

AoA allows for use of very simple, low-cost tags to act as the source device of which we wish to determine its location. This system would have more complex locator units mounted in an unobstructed manner in location to determine and calculate the position of items that are tagged.

Such scenarios might include:

• Asset tracking in warehouses

• Value asset tracking in hospitals, govt. establishments etc.

• ID location of people and staff

AoD requires more complex tags than AoA from a hardware and software perspective. In this scenario, the locator device can be simpler in terms of hardware design but does have software complexity for the determination and calculation of the direction-finding functionality.

AoD based direction-finding has some strong use cases that include smartphones and wearables. At this time smartphones do not support Bluetooth Direction Finding, but it is expected they will at some point.

Such scenarios might include:

• Wayfinding in large spaces such as airports, hospitals, etc.

• Point of interest assistance in shopping malls, exhibitions, etc.

• Search and finding of items such as keys, remote controls, etc.

We are developing 5.1 Bluetooth for led smart high bay and smart troffer, too, but it will take another four to five months to succeed, probably on Jan or Feb  2021. We Hope can work with you on our smart high bay and smart troffer soon.