A few members of the Mbed team, along with colleagues from the Arm Cordio team, travelled to San Jose last week to attend Bluetooth World at the Santa Clara Convention Center, at the heart of Silicon Valley. Our main focus was the announcement, which we hope you’ve already seen, of the release of the fully featured and qualified Cordio 5.0 BLE stack in Mbed OS, in a keynote from Zach Shelby, our VP of Developer Ecosystem. The news that we were making the whole stack source code available under the Apache 2.0 license alongside the rest of the Mbed OS code base was very well received, not just at the show but more widely in technology media coverage.

Arm were also present at the developer track, with Austin Blackstone from our developer evangelism team leading a workshop showing that using BLE in your IoT application has never been easier. Over forty developers attended many of whom were getting their first exposure to Mbed. Feedback was positive with comments received on how quick and easy it was to get started and begin to explore the BLE features our APIs expose. We hope that by including BLE 5.0 features in Mbed, developers will be able to use the technology in new and innovative ways.

We also believe that our silicon partners will benefit from the addition of this technology, giving them access to a production ready BLE protocol stack that they can now incorporate into their products using Mbed. We’ve been working with many of them in recent months in supporting their evaluation of the Cordio stack and expect to soon see developer boards launched including BLE 5.0.

The event was also an opportunity to find out more about how companies and developers are using BLE in IoT, especially in the areas of asset tracking, logistics and connected spaces. My personal highlight was the talk by a NASA developer on how the challenges they face using BLE in space, shielding devices from gamma radiation and solar flares is not something most of us face. The addition of higher bandwidth and longer range in the 5.0 version of BLE is clearly helping to extend the use of BLE in new and interesting ways, and with it now available in Mbed we are excited to see how our ecosystem innovates in IoT.

If you are interested in seeing the source code for yourself, then please follow the link to our GitHub repository: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os/tree/master/features/FEATURE_BLE/targets/TARGET_CORDIO