Intel Edison and BLE

BLE stands for Bluetooth Low Energy.

Intel Edison supports out-of-the-box (no additional shields required) two communication ways:

• WIFI
• BLE

One scenario where you can think to adopt an Intel Edison board is where you want to use Edison as a Field Gateway. Sensors are connected to small, low-power, resource constrained boards like Arduino 101 (https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoard101).

They read the data from sensors and communicate these data to the Edison Gateway using BLE.

Then Edison aggregates and sends out these data using WIFI. For example using MQTT messages to an IoT Cloud Service.

BLE is low power, is easily supported by constrained resources boards, but can be employed only for short range communications (for example in the use case of the “Connected Car”).

I’ll cover BLE and BLE on Edison in next blog posts. Stay tuned.