Bluetooth LE

showstack / protocols / bluetooth-le

Also called BLE, Bluetooth Low Energy.

Short-range, low-power radio built around small structured attributes rather than a data stream. On a show it is mostly a configuration and sensing channel — a phone setting up a fixture, a beltpack reporting battery, a beacon advertising its presence — rather than anything a cue depends on.

Device managementOpen, free sign-upBluetooth SIGReported

Control Small, urgent, must arrive

Small messages that either repeat constantly or fire once. Bandwidth is almost never the problem.

What kills it. Latency and loss on the messages that fire once. A repeating level survives a dropped packet; a GO does not.

Why this one, and not what the category suggests. In this industry it is nearly always a control link — a phone setting a fixture or a speaker.

The four flows, and why the model is worth having →

What goes wrong

2.4 GHz, in the same band as Wi-Fi and a great many other things, in a room full of phones.

Range is short by design and highly dependent on bodies, which absorb 2.4 GHz well.

Pairing and bonding state lives on both devices and is a common cause of "it worked yesterday".

Typical use

Configuring a device from a phone without a network.
Beacons for proximity and wayfinding in a venue.
Sensor and battery telemetry from worn or portable equipment.

Sources

Bluetooth Low Energy — Bluetooth SIG primary

Understand the mechanism

Robots, animatronics and connected things

Something wrong, or missing?

Known gaps on this entry: default_ports, implementations. If you can source one of them, that is a ten minute pull request.

Edit this entry on GitHub — one file, editable in your browser, and your handle goes on it permanently.

Work at Bluetooth SIG? Confirm or correct this entry — it is free, it stays free, and nothing about it is for sale.