How To Build High Quality Bluetooth Low Energy Products

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If you’re a developer working on a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) product, you need to have a clear understanding of the various considerations and challenges you’ll face at each stage of the development process. That’s why SwaraLink Technologies created the Bluetooth Low Energy Developer’s Checklist. In this podcast, the CEO and Co-Founder of SwaraLink Technologies, Sandeep Kamath, breaks down BLE and the checklist they’ve created, including various topics, from optimizing throughput and power consumption to ensuring secure connections and supporting over-the-air firmware updates. These aren’t necessarily must-dos, but they’re essential considerations to keep in mind as you design, develop, and test your product.

About Sandeep

Sandeep was initially a self-taught programmer, playing around with QBASIC and Visual C++ in high school, but then shifted his interest from software to hardware while at the university level. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego, focusing on Analog and RF Integrated Circuit Design. His educational background in hardware and RF systems and personal interest in software eventually led him to the world of embedded wireless systems. After graduating, Sandeep spent over a decade in the semiconductor industry, including eight years working for Texas Instruments Wireless Connectivity group. During his career at TI, Sandeep worked in various technical, management, and business roles, all related to TI’s Bluetooth Low Energy product line. In 2017 Sandeep took his knowledge of Bluetooth Low Energy from both a technology and market standpoint and founded SwaraLink Technologies to help companies build high-quality products with great user experiences.

Interested in connecting with Sandeep? Reach out on Linkedin!

About SwaraLink Technologies

SwaraLink Technologies is a services and solutions company focused on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) systems and software. Their flagship product, the SwaraLink Bluetooth Low Energy Platform, is a cross-platform middleware solution that reduces the cost of developing high-quality products that use Bluetooth Low Energy technology. SwaraLink was founded and incorporated in the State of California in 2017, with headquarters in San Diego. Since its founding, SwaraLink has helped numerous customers with various services, including architecture, development, testing, and debugging complex hardware and software systems that use Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy Technology.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(01:42) Introduction to Sandeep and SwaraLink

(02:13) Founding story

(04:28) Previous ways of Bluetooth Low Energy products

(06:40) Role of Bluetooth Low Energy in IoT

(08:25) Challenges to deploying Bluetooth Low Energy products

(13:45) Importance of UX in building a Bluetooth Low Energy product

(16:15) Bluetooth Low Energy developer checklist

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Transcript:

– [Sandeep] Our philosophy is that, you know, if you wanna build a great Bluetooth product, let’s say you have an idea for a product, you don’t necessarily wanna be spending your time becoming a Bluetooth expert. You wanna spend your time focusing on what your product is doing. If let’s say you’re building a wearable sensor, there’s probably something cool that you’re trying to do. Well, we think that you should be focusing your time on building something cool, not on understanding how Bluetooth works.

– [Ryan] Hello, everyone and welcome to our episode of the IoT For All Podcast, presented by IoT For All, the number one publication and resource for the Internet of Things. I’m your host, Ryan Chacon. If you’re watching us on YouTube, we truly appreciate if you give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel if you have not done so already. If you’re listening to us on a podcast directory like Apple Podcast, please subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as they’re out. All right, on today’s episode, we have Sandeep Kamath, CEO and founder of SwaraLink Technologies. They are a services and solutions company focused on Bluetooth Low Energy systems and software. So we’re gonna talk a lot about that. We’re gonna talk about BLE, what it really is, the role it’s playing in IoT, kind of what is a BLE product, challenges with deploying BLE products, how to build high-quality Bluetooth products with great user experience, things along those lines. So a lot of good conversation around a very important technology in the IoT space, I think we get a lot of value out of. But before we get into it, if you’re out there are looking to enter the fast-growing and profitable IoT market, but don’t know where to start, check out our sponsor, Leverege. Leverege’s a IoT solutions development platform, provides everything you need to create turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com. That’s iotchangeseverything.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All Podcast. Welcome, Sandeep, to the IoT For All Podcast. Thanks for being here this week.

– [Sandeep] Thanks, Ryan.

– [Ryan] Yeah, it’s great to have you. Let’s kick this off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself and overview of the company for our audience.

– [Sandeep] Yeah, for sure. My name is Sandeep Kamath and my company is named SwaraLink Technologies. We are a consulting and services and solutions firm that focuses on Bluetooth Low Energy technology. We help companies with hardware development, software development, mobile app development, really anything that involves Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy technology.

– [Ryan] Fantastic, and tell me, I’d love to hear about the story of kind of how the company came about. So, you know, when you founded the company, what kind of opportunity do you see in the market? How did the idea for the company come about and, you know, kind of that journey to get you to where you are now?

– [Sandeep] Sure, yeah. Prior to founding SwaraLink Technologies, I was working in the semiconductor industry for over a decade, and most recently, I was with a vendor that makes chip sets focused on Bluetooth Low Energy technology. So, you know, in my role there, I had a chance to learn a lot about the technology and also see what the market was like, see what customers, the customers being product developers, the challenges that they were facing in writing their software to build their products. So when I left my previous role with a semiconductor vendor, when I founded SwaraLink Technologies, I really wanted to help companies build high quality Bluetooth Low Energy products. ‘Cause I’d seen that there were so many products out there that were just unreliable, really just had bad user experiences. You know, I’d see issues where someone would make a product and they’re expecting long battery life and the batteries would die after two weeks. You know, that’s a really bad user experience. Another common thing I would see is people would make products where they need to transmit large amounts of data and you’d have to sit there for five minutes to transmit data. Maybe it’s sensor data that’s being stored or various other types of data. And I knew that the problem wasn’t so much that Bluetooth or that Bluetooth Low Energy is not capable of delivering a great user experience. The problem really was that the software is really complex and when I founded SwaraLink Technologies, initially the goal was to be a consulting firm and a services firm to help companies build great products that use Bluetooth technology. Over time, we realized that if we wanted to scale this, scale our solution, we would actually have to build a software platform that kind of encapsulated all of these great features of Bluetooth, but made it easy for product developers. So that’s something that I wanted to talk about today, which is something we just launched this last month, which is the SwaraLink Bluetooth Low Energy Platform.

– [Ryan] Nice, and so how does, I guess without getting tied too into the details here, when it comes to development of BLE products, what has been the way to build them versus we using a platform? How does that change kind of the experience?

– [Sandeep] Sure, so the typical experience that companies go through is they download an SDK from their chip vendor, you know, and they buy development kits, so some common development kits. This is a Nordic Semiconductors development kit. This is one from Silicon Labs, and they have the Bluetooth chip on the board. And when you download the SDK from the chip vendor, they usually provide example applications and, you know, there’s training, there’s resources online, but usually in order to actually build your product, there’s a lot of very specific details related to the Bluetooth standard, that there’s a lot of knowledge about Bluetooth that’s really required to really understand what you’re doing. You can try to copy and paste example applications and it might get you to enable you to hack something together, but these are the types of products which aren’t really optimized. So if you just kind of copy, paste an example application, you’re gonna end up with something that’s really basic and it’s not necessarily tailored to what you’re doing. If you look at the APIs from the SDKs, they use a lot of really Bluetooth-specific terminology. Anyone who’s tried to develop with Bluetooth might have seen these terms, a GAP and GATT and ATT and L2CAP. And, you know, essentially it almost comes down to, you know, in order to build a good product, you almost have to speak a whole new language. And that’s not to say that it’s not possible to do, I mean, there’s companies that have done it. But our philosophy is that, you know, if you wanna build a great Bluetooth product, let’s say you have an idea for a product, you don’t necessarily wanna be spending your time becoming a Bluetooth expert. You wanna spend your time focusing on what your product is doing. If let’s say you’re building a wearable sensor, there’s probably something cool that you’re trying to do. Well, we think that you should be focusing your time on building something cool, not on understanding how Bluetooth works.

– [Ryan] Right, right. No, that totally makes a ton of sense. I wanted to kind of break away for a second and just for audience members out there who may not exactly understand kind of what BLE is and the role it’s playing in this space, if you could just quickly high level it for them, that’d be fantastic.

– [Sandeep] For sure, yeah, I think probably most people are familiar with Bluetooth, you know, Bluetooth headsets, Bluetooth speakers, I’m talking on AirPods right now, which is a Bluetooth product. So traditionally, Bluetooth had been used for audio applications and that’s, primarily, it’s where it’s still used today. In 2009, or sorry, 2010, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group released the Bluetooth 4.0 standard, which included Bluetooth Low Energy. What Bluetooth Low Energy did was it kind of simplified, I don’t wanna say it overly simplified things, but it kind of changed the Bluetooth protocol to allow for applications that have very low amounts of data, but could last for a very long time on a battery, potentially on a coin cell battery or, you know, a rechargeable battery that will last a long time. So the example I like to always use that I think a lot of people are familiar with, is Fitbit. So Fitbit’s a product that’s been out there for a while and it’s a great example of something where there’s not a ton of data that really needs to be sent from the Fitbit to your phone. It’s just tracking the amount of, you know, your steps and maybe your heart rate. And it, you know, we’re talking about bytes of data per second. So Bluetooth Low Energy is a protocol that was really geared towards these types of applications. And iOS and Android adopted Bluetooth Low Energy approximately 2011, 2012. And, you know, now there’s many products out there that are using this technology.

– [Ryan] Fantastic, yeah, I appreciate you giving that a quick overview. So when we’re talking about a BLE product, so that’s just an IoT product that uses BLE technology, is that correct?

– [Sandeep] That’s correct, yes.

– [Ryan] Okay, fantastic. And when we’re talking about the development of BLE products, I mean, I’m sure there are tons of different angles you could take the answer to this question, but what are some of the biggest challenges companies, developers, you know, really face when it comes to deploying BLE products? And I wanna kinda focus on that here for a second. If you could kind of pick some of the bigger challenges that are worth noting.

– [Sandeep] For sure, yeah, I think, you know, as I mentioned, I think the software is fairly complex. So when building a product, there’s usually kind of two main pieces of software needed. There’s the embedded software which is running on the device such as, you know, Nordic Semiconductors or Silicon Labs device. And then there’s the mobile application. Now, there’s other types of Bluetooth products as well that, you know, involve mesh technology or kind of other broader use cases. But, you know, we’re just gonna focus on kind of these more basic use cases where you have a device talking to a mobile application. So you need an embedded software developer that’s gonna write the code that runs on the device. And a mobile software developer that’s gonna write the, you know, write your mobile app. You know, as I mentioned, there’s gonna be complexity in understanding the Bluetooth standard and working with the SDKs and APIs that use the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol. I think another area where people run into a lot of problems is really on the test side. So today, if you wanna build a Bluetooth product that talks to an iOS device and an Android device, there’s a lot of really nuanced behavior that the phones will do. And common issues that we see in our consulting work is people build a product and maybe it’s working 90% of the time, but then they’ll have this, you know, 10% of the time, 5% of the time where either their customers, if their product’s in the market, or maybe just in their test, if they haven’t released their product, they see things like random disconnects or pairing fails 10% of the time. Or, you know, another case is where, similar to what I said, you know, the battery consumption is not necessarily what they expect it to be, even though, you know, Bluetooth Low Energy is supposed to be a low power standard. So I think, you know, getting something up and running might be easy, but then there’s a lot of these like nuanced details, which is really gonna make or break your product. I mean, if it’s failing for 10% of the time, that’s not a very good user experience.

– [Ryan] No, not at all. Yeah, it’s, you know, one of the topics we, or at least areas we try to cover in a lot of these conversations is around the challenges that different technologies or different processes or different deployments see when it comes to use cases in different applications. Is there a typical type of product or kind of vertical that you see BLE kind of pose more of a challenge in, using the technology to implement those kinds of products? Or is it kind of just across the board when it comes to the building any type of BLE product?

– [Sandeep] I’d say a lot of these issues are really across the board. And I’ll give you another example of a common issue that I see. So a lot of applications, sometimes people don’t think about security. You know, for medical devices, sure. You know, security’s usually on the forefront of people’s minds. But let’s say you’re building something that’s just like a simple consumer gadget that has no financial implications or medical implications if you know, if it’s, say it’s unsecure. Well, what I think a lot of people don’t realize is that security can be as simple as preventing an unwanted user from connecting to your device, even if there’s nothing malicious that they can really do. So what can happen is, let’s say you have a device, you have nothing that’s protecting, sorry, let’s call ’em unauthorized users from connecting to it. Well, I can just take my phone and download an off-the-shelf application, which enables me to just connect to any Bluetooth Low Energy device, and I can just connect to some device that someone has. While that user might take out their phone, you know, the actual user and the owner of this product might be trying to use the app and connect to their device, and to them, they’re not gonna be able to connect to it because, A, you know, a hacker or, you know, this could just literally just be a kid who’s downloaded an app, has connected to their device. Now to the actual user of this product, they’re gonna think that their product’s broken because they’re just not able to connect to it. They’re not gonna realize that there’s a security failure here or that something malicious is happening. To them, they’re just seeing I’m trying to connect to my device and it’s not working. I’m gonna return my product ’cause it’s not working. So there’s little things like that, which are some of the details that if you’re not thinking these things through when you’re building your product, they can actually cause, you know, really bad user experiences and failures out in the field.

– [Ryan] Yeah, I was gonna ask you about user experience because a lot of times in the conversations I’ve had with other guests, we talk about the kind of building from the user and the user experience backwards because of how valuable that experience is in delivering and realizing the value of a product or a solution in the IoT space. So talk to me about the challenges that the user experience sometimes poses when it comes to building and deploying Bluetooth products.

– [Sandeep] Yeah, for sure. And I think that’s a great approach to looking at it, is to look backwards. And we always encourage that when working with, you know, our platform customers as well as our consulting customers. I always want people to envision how do you expect the user to user product? And probably the one word that comes to mind is I think great user experiences are usually seamless, seamless and intuitive. Typically with Bluetooth products, that will involve opening up an app on your phone and maybe either turning on your device if it has an on switch or pressing a button on your device to put it into, you know, a pairing or connection mode. And then everything just kind of works naturally from that point on. With Bluetooth Low Energy, you don’t even need to go into your Bluetooth menu to pair, which, you know, with iOS and Android devices, typically with audio applications, you do need to go through your phone settings, connect to device pair. But with Bluetooth Low Energy, actually all of that can be managed completely within the application. So, you know, what I like to say is it should be seamless, which might mean if there’s a button that the user needs to press on their device, you can actually have your app instruct the user, you can show a picture of your device and, you know, an arrow pointing to the button saying, “Press this button to put your device into pairing mode.” Once the user puts into the pairing mode, the application, the mobile application can kind of naturally either walk the user through that setup process or automatically do it.

– [Ryan] Yeah, it’s something that I feel like is as silly as it sounds, it’s often overlooked and it shouldn’t be. It seems like a very common area that maybe the attention is not as paid as much as it should be, but it’s something that definitely contributes high level or across the board, I would say, to the success of any product regardless of the technology that’s involved inside it.

– [Sandeep] Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

– [Ryan] So one of the last questions I have here for you before I let you go is, so we’ve talked about kind of the challenges, we’ve talked about what BLE products are and how they kind of work. What is your advice or kind of what are the steps that you recommend companies take when it comes to building a high-quality Bluetooth product with a great user experience? Like, how can people do that?

– [Sandeep] Yeah, you know, we have a document which is called “The Bluetooth Low Energy Developer’s Checklist.” And within this document, which is available for download from our website, SwaraLink.com, you know, for free, fill out a form and download it. We give you a list of, let’s call them things that you should think about at every stage of your development when you’re first kind of architecting your product, during software development and during your testing phase. And these are, they’re not necessarily things that are must-dos, but they’re things that you have to at least think about. Some of the things on the checklist are optimizing for throughput, optimizing for power consumption. You should think about what is your battery life that you expect on your product? Well, you should make sure that you’re actually doing the right things to make sure that you get the battery life that you want. We talked about security and preventing unauthorized connections that I mentioned. Here’s another one. Over-the-air firmware updates. We believe that every single Bluetooth Low Energy device should support over-the-air firmer updates. And the reason for that is because you just never know what’s gonna happen in the future. You never know if there’s gonna be bugs found on your application. You never know if there’s gonna be bugs in the Bluetooth stack, which is code that you’re not even writing. You wanna be able to update your product in the field as well as, you know, there’s also security updates that you might wanna patch in the future. So we think that every product should really support over-the-air firmware updates. So, you know, I always tell developers that they should look through and think through all these different items on our checklist. And once you’ve done that, then you gotta look at what are my options? Well, you know, as I said, you can use the SDKs directly from developer, from the semiconductor company that you’re working with and they support these features. But that doesn’t mean that you get these features by default, you still need to write your application code, you still need to test them out, you still need to verify that it works with iOS, works with Android, that it works reliably. You know, another option that I think some people look at if they’re trying to do this more easily, is they look at certain, there’s prototyping platforms out there. I mean, Arduino is one that a lot of people are familiar with. And, you know, Arduino supports a lot of these features, but, one, it’s not as easy to use as you might think it is. Arduino still requires you to kind of understand a lot of the details of Bluetooth standard. And then Arduinos are great for prototyping, but they’re not necessarily gonna be useful when you are ready to mass produce a product and build 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 units of your product. So you really wanna think through what is the software solution that’s gonna work for you during development, prototyping, testing and mass production? And, you know, we built something that our middleware platform is something that I feel that addresses Bluetooth software development during all of these phases.

– [Ryan] Fantastic, yeah, this is, I think that the checklist that you mentioned that you have is a very key thing to take away from this conversation. That there is a roadmap on how to do this well. It’s been proven out, it’s been, you know, done by many different companies and developers to bring a BLE product to market and without, you know, with avoiding the kind of common pitfalls and kind of overcoming those challenges that we were speaking about earlier in our conversation. I think it’s something that, you know, every company can benefit from kind of building themselves and, or, sorry, utilizing, but also in the space that they play in, having kind of a checklist of how to do things the right way for their customers, their developers, the people that are interacting with their tools or platforms, to kind of achieve success faster. Gives them a chance to achieve success faster. And I think what you guys have done is super interesting and I think our audience is gonna get a ton of value out of kinda looking into that and better understanding how they can do this the right way.

– [Sandeep] Yeah, absolutely.

– [Ryan] Last thing I wanna ask you or kind of mention, is for our audience who wants to learn more about kind of what you all do, the space you’re in, follow up with any questions, those kinds of things, what’s the best way that they can kind of reach out and touch base?

– [Sandeep] Yeah, for sure. You can find information on our platform at SwaraLink.com. We also have, you can run a demo of our platform yourself. If you have one of these development kits from Nordic Semiconductors or Silicon Labs, that’s all documented on our website, SwaraLink.com/docs. Feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn or email me, [email protected] I’m happy to answer any questions that anyone might have about this.

– [Ryan] Fantastic, well, Sandeep, thank you so much for taking the time. A great conversation around topic that yeah, I’d love us to be able to cover more. So looking forward to working together more closely and hopefully getting more content out to our audience around Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, bringing these products to market, how to do it the right way. So really appreciate your time and I look forward talking to you again soon.

– [Sandeep] For sure. Thanks for having me, Ryan.

– [Ryan] All right everyone, thanks again for watching that episode of the IoT For All Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please click the thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel, and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available. Other than that, thanks again for watching and we’ll see you next time.

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