iOS Development

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Hello everyone, maybe you are familiar with IT-Croud and where the title for this blog post came from. It is some kind of an opener for a little story about a hardware I’m developing with a friend of mine in Zurich. A long time ago I started to play around with Bluetooth Low Energy and I ordered the BLE112 Devkit provided by BlueGiga. The first thing I did was to set a GPIO pin high and low in order to turn LEDs on and off.

BLE-Shield iPhone App Sources available on github

Hello everyone, since I promised an iPhone Sample Application to access the Kickstarter BLE-Shield, I finished the app today and pushed it to the BLE-Shield github repository: https://github.com/michaelkroll/BLE-Shield The user interface is implemented similar to the Messages application of iOS. Yes, correct… you can chat with your BLE-Shield somehow and it’ll answer 😉 I will add some more UI features in the future and make some bug fixes if necessary.

The BLE-Shield is finally on Kickstarter !

Hello guys, finally I managed to get the BLE-Shield, teamed up with Jonathan Prevo and Don Mallicot again. See the following link to get to the Kickstarter Project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rowdyrobot/arduino-ble-shield-connecting-the-ios-and-the-ardu I decided to startover on Kickstarter, since the initial poll I made to get an estimate how many people are interested in a shield, showed me that I could never afford it to pay for this amount upfront. The final design of the Shield v1.

BLE Shield Project: RFID Tag Reader

After creating the BLE Shield for Arduino it is time to create some projects with it to show you what can be done using the shield. Now it is time to create a simple RFID Tag Reader using the BLE Shield. In order to stack such a device together, I grabbed the following out of my “Arduino Box”: 1 x Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V 1 x Adafruit PN532 NFC/RFID Controller Shield for Arduino 1 x Seeddstudio Solar Charger Shield v0.

Kickstarter Project: tōd - Connect Real World Actions to Mobile Devices and the Web

The Kickstarter project “tōd:Connect Real World Actions to Mobile Devices and the Web” is now online, and I recommend all readers of my blog to visit the Kickstarter.com pages since I’m involved in this project as well. For people who were interested in the location micro cells I created as my first BLE hardware can get some tōd’s since they can offer similar functionality without need to change the firmware. The location microcells were just a feasibility study on how to create a small hardware to communicate with an iPhone4S and are now discontinued after tōd has been announced.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Arduino Shield Prototype finished.

After spending some time on hardware- and software development I finally finished a first working prototype of an Arduino Bluetooth Low Energy Shield. A detailed story about the shield shown below can be found in the Hardware Section or directly using this link: http://www.mkroll.mobi/?page_id=386 Read what others are writing about the BLE Shield: http://blog.makezine.com/2012/03/19/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://transalchemy.com/2012/03/19/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://houseofmods.com/2012/03/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://high-technology.info/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://pricegadgetreviews.com/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://www.itclips.net/2012/03/20/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/ http://dev.squarecows.com/2012/03/19/bluetooth-4-0-from-arduino-to-iphone-no-jailbreaking-no-mfi/

Bluetooth RFID Reader pages in the hardware section updated.

The Bluetooth RFID Reader pages in the hardware section has been updated now. I finally added pictures of the RFID Reader in a plastic enclosure printed by shapeways.com to the post. I’m currently preparing a short demo video showing the RFID reader connected to the iPhone in action.

First batch of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Location Microcells finished and tested

A while a go I started to create a first PCB design for a Bluetooth Low Energy Microcell, which should be used to setup an indoor localization system. The PCB has been manufactured in december and I assembled it during the xmas holidays. Using the iBLE application, which is a generic BLE explorer app and still under development, I can discover the macrocells and read their RSSI. There is still some work to do in order to locate an iPhone4S indoors, but I wanted to share the progress of this project with anybody who is interested.