STMicroelectronics’ New Framework Accelerates Completion of Bluetooth® Wireless-Sensing Projects

STMicroelectronics’ new BlueMicrosystem1 Open.Framework accelerates completion of Bluetooth^® Low Energy wireless-sensing projects targeting Android or iOS platforms.

BlueMicrosystem1 provides a complete solution for applications that need to sense, process, and transmit temperature, humidity, pressure, and/or movement/location data. The framework is an ideal springboard for developing Internet-of-Things devices, wearable electronics, and other wireless-sensor applications that require high performance and very low power consumption.

BlueMicrosystem1 comes with libraries including a real-time motion-sensor, and a sample barometer application that speeds adoption by showing how to build fully functional wireless sensor nodes. The ready-to-run barometer application is built by easily connecting three boards: an STM32 Nucleo F4 microcontroller board (NUCLEO-F401RE), a MEMS and environmental sensor X-NUCLEO expansion board (X-NUCLEO-IKS01A1), and a Bluetooth Low Energy expansion board (X-NUCLEO-IDB04A1).

The sensor expansion board contains a humidity/temperature sensor, a MEMS barometric pressure sensor, an inertial module featuring a 3D digital accelerometer and 3D digital gyroscope, and a 3-axis MEMS magnetometer, which all together provide 10 degrees of freedom (10 DOF) position sensing. The Bluetooth expansion board contains ST’s BlueNRG low-power network coprocessor with built-in 2.4GHz radio. BlueMicrosystem1 includes drivers that recognize the transceiver and sensors. The STM32 Nucleo microcontroller boards cover all STM32 product series, allowing developers to choose the type of MCU that best suits their application needs.

ST’s Open Software Expansion development suite, which includes Open.Framework, Open.MEMS, and Open.RF, offers drivers, middleware, and application software to jump-start Internet of Things and Embedded designs with a broad range of compatible and complementary products, including sensors and radios. The suite enables fast prototyping using leading-edge components to accelerate time-to-market.