Cool Summer Free Article: Line AC Switch Controlled by Bluetooth Low Energy

This article describes the electronics, the BL600 program and the Android program; the last being an Android smartphone application with which your mains switch circuit may be controlled wirelessly. You may notice an unusual detail for these pages — the transformerless power supply.

After the waves made in the wireless world by the ESP8266, we can now expect a tsunami caused by its big brother, the ESP32. Along with a dual-core processor, it has onboard Bluetooth, more RAM, and IO extensions. The ESP32 can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. Later this year, Elektor Magazine will also write about the native development tool IDF. For the time being and for you, Elektor soldered the castellated/edge-plated ESP32 module on a breakout-board which easily fits in all your experiments on breadboards and elsewhere.

Ionizing radiation is present everywhere on earth, but high doses of radiation are very harmful to living organisms. With the new portable Dosime radiation meter you can measure radiation levels in your surroundings and display them using an app on your smartphone.

Hexiwear is a wearable development kit for the Internet of Things era. A small and sleek, low-power device packed with sensors to quantify yourself and the world around you. Wirelessly enabled, it can connect both to devices nearby – or to cloud servers far away. Its greatest feature? The new and original firmware YOU will develop.

Mobile devices that do not support Bluetooth 4 (or BLE) can (of course) not communicate with BLE devices. With this bridge however, they can.

Anaren's Bluetooth Smart Development kit and innovative Atmosphere online development tool are designed to create all the embedded code and target mobile device applications needed to wirelessly connect and communicate to an embedded Bluetooth Smart module. Learn how to use data from the STMicroelectronics LPS25HB piezoelectric pressure sensor and the LIS3MDL magnetometer.

If you find it hard or costly to get your hands on one of those beautiful development kits on offer these days from just about any company active in the embedded and microcontroller industry, get a train ticket or hitch a ride to the Nuremberg Embedded World show.

If wires and cables keep cluttering your desktop then you may be interested in wireless measuring and data-logging instruments. The SmartProbe is a concept for a hand-held probe without controls or display and that uses a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connection to a smartphone or tablet app.

This ultra-miniaturised circuit board, only slightly larger than the button cell that powers it, connects to a smartphone and sends it some environmental measurements captured by its sensors: acceleration, force, angular velocity, magnetic field, pressure, altitude and temperature, All this over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

The Lumina project came out of the Loochi project, an abandoned Bluetooth controlled RGB lamp that missed its crowdfunding target. A redesign became necessary when key components of the original project went obsolete. Lumina is an up-to-date design with a modern RGBW LED...