In the previous posts you learned how to use the esp32 chip to receive and parse the advertising packets transmitted by BLE peripherals. As a practical example, I developed a program to detect the presence of a particular iBeacon and activate an output accordingly. In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn how to transmit advertising packets instead. Advertising process…
After having developed a sketch using the Arduino IDE, you can compile and load it on the Arduino board connected to your PC with just a click on the upload button: The program is stored in the flash memory of the microcontroller (on Arduino Uno boards this is the ATmega328p). You can upload your program…
In a recent tutorial I explained how to detect the presence of an iBeacon with the esp32 chip. The iBeacon used to demonstrate the program is manufactured by a chinese Company, Wellcore, and sold by Banggood. The transmitter is enclosed in a plastic, non waterproof, case of 4x4cm size: The enclosure has a hole that allows you to hang the…
In my previous article I explained the Bluetooth Low Energy technology and the advertising process. You learned that a BLE device can leverage the advertising packets to send data; in this case the device is called broadcaster and the devices which receive data are called observers. The payload of an advertising packet has the following structure: ADV ADDR is the device MAC address (this is the…
In my previous tutorials you learned how to use the wifi interface of the esp32 chip. Starting from this post, I’m going to explain you the second wireless technology the esp32 chip supports: bluetooth. In particular, my tutorial will be about Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), sometimes called also Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Smart: Bluetooth Low Energy BLE is a technology…
One of the most frequent questions I receive from my website’s contact form or from my Facebook page is whether it’s possible to publish an HTTP server when the esp32 chip is working in SoftAP mode, that is when it publishes its own wifi network. In previous tutorials (18 – Access Point and 20 – Webserver) I’ve already blogged about the…
Some time ago my friend Mauro Alfieri showed me an interesting development board produced by DFRobot and called Bluno Beetle (now Beetle Ble). It seemed the perfect board to start “playing” with the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology; therefore I ordered one board directly from the DFRobot store. I expected to receive the usual anonymous parcel with…
One of the major concerns for embedded devices is the power consumption. If the device you’re designing will be battery powered, it’s indeed important to reduce as much as possible its power consumption to maximize the autonomy (= the working time before it’s necessary to replace or recharge the battery). The esp32 chip offers 5 different power…
When I was analyzing the source code of an opensource software, I found an interesting technique to parse incoming data in a very efficient way, using a struct. This technique works if the received data has a fixed length and structure; for example it applies very well to data “packets”. When receiving, the program normally stores incoming data…
Today’s project, ESP32lights, is a smart device based on the esp32 chip. Thanks to ESP32lights you can turn a load on and off (I used it for my christmas lights) [checklist] manually based on daily schedules based on the light intensity [/checklist] ESP32lights connects to your wifi network, can be configured and operated via a…