Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining TI's webinar session on how Bluetooth 5 is breaking barriers and connected applications. I'm Casey O'Grady, product marketing engineer for Low Power RF. And in today's webinar, we're going to focus on the current wireless landscape, where Bluetooth Low Energy fits into that, what are the new technical features of Bluetooth 5, a few application examples and where you can leverage multi protocol, and then we'll wrap up with some resources. So let's get started.

As we look at the current wireless landscape, there are a lot of emerging wireless connectivity options. And as you're looking to select the best protocol for your application, it can be difficult to make that choice. You oftentimes will be looking at which parts of the world are you deploying this product, and what are the regulatory compliances that you need to meet in that region? What type of range do you need to meet? How long is your battery meant to last with this product? What type of throughput, and then any interoperability of ecosystems that you're working with.

With all of those considerations, it can be hard. But by leveraging TI.com, it makes it much easier to choose the right solution for your product. And this webinar is meant to focus on leveraging TI.com to navigate and explore the resources there so that you have all this content fully accessible for you to make this process easier.

And we'll start on TI.com/simplelink. As we land on this page, you'll see that we have a simple chart that looks at a few main selection decisions that you'll be thinking about for your product. Oftentimes, it comes down to your network topology, your power consumption, your range, and your throughput requirements. We've outlined these comparisons side by side across the breadth of technology options, hoping to make it easier for you to select the best fit.

TI SimpleLink MCU Platform is a set of ARM based microcontrollers that span across our wired and wireless portofilo. You'll see here we have Bluetooth Low Energy, sub 1 GHz, Wi-Fi, Thread, Zigbee, multi standard, and ethernet options. And based on that breadth of wired and wireless connectivity options, we've built a common SimpleLink SDK. This is meant to enable you with the maximum amount of flexibility to port your code from one SimpleLink microcontroller to another.

We've realized that, in today's market, there are a lot of times where you have an existing product already deployed, and you want to add connectivity to that, or you're developing multiple products, and each SKU may leverage a different wireless protocol. Say you have one thermostat that's Wi-Fi connected, and you have another thermostat that's leveraging Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth Low Energy. With that, we want to be able to enable you to reuse your software across each product. With this SimpleLink SDK, we're enabling 100% application code portability so that you don't have to start from scratch each time you're starting a product.

You'll see here, at the bottom, we have our common SimpleLink core SDK components. So this shows that it's common TI drivers and driver libraries across these MCUs. All of this SDK is integrated on top of RI RTOS, which enables automatic power management. It also is POSIX compliant. So this is a standard that enables code portability across different OS's. You're able to add security features. We have our plethora of middleware and stacks. And then, lastly, we have plugins that can add additional functionality to your design, whether it's our CapTIvate voice recognition, or you want to hook up directly to the cloud with AWS, Microsoft Azure or Apple Home Care.

So now that we've looked at all these protocols, let's dig a little bit deeper into Bluetooth Low Energy specifically. Since there are so many wireless connectivity standards in the market, let's take a look at, what are the true benefits of Bluetooth Low Energy? First of all, it's ubiquitous technology, and it's embedded in every smartphone. So the huge growth in the number of smartphones in the market has organically grown the Bluetooth Low Energy market. And we control so many things from our smartphone that it's only natural for us to want to control more. So this has really increased the demand for Bluetooth Low Energy connected products. And since Bluetooth Low Energy is in the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum, it's easier to achieve worldwide regulatory compliance.

Bluetooth Low Energy is also very low power consumption, so it's meant to run products for a long amount of time off of even small coin cell batteries. It's built upon a standard that's very robust. So this leads to tested interoperability across Bluetooth Low Energy products.

And, lastly, it's evolving to reach many new markets, because when I've historically thought of Bluetooth, the first thing that comes to mind is my wireless earphones. Or maybe I'm at work and I have a wireless keyboard or at home or at the gym. I have a fitness tracker. And while these are really great and beneficial applications, this only covers a few market segments.

But lately as I'm hearing Bluetooth, I'm hearing more and more branded products in the market that span very different end equipments. Now we're seeing smart connected door locks using BLE. We're seeing airport apps that are navigating you turn by turn to your terminal or to the baggage claim, and we're even hearing about remote keyless entry, of using your smartphone to enter or exit your vehicle.

And so this is really a big shift. These new applications are very different from the historic Bluetooth applications. So what has really caused this disruptive growth in the market? And it all comes down to Bluetooth 5.

So what's new with Bluetooth 5, and what has enabled it to cause such a disruption in the market? As we look at the new features of Bluetooth 5, it really comes down to three big advantages. The first one we're going to look at is the new long range mode, and this is achieved through coded PHY's. There are two coded PHY rates that you can leverage, 500 kilobits per second and 125 kilobits per second, the latter of which is how you achieve four times the range. This is really done by reducing the data rate to one eighth its normal capacity. So each bit carries eight times more energy.

And with this, the number of over the air modulated symbols is increased for each bit, so now it's easier for the receiver to distinguish a signal over noise. So this improved sensitivity of the receiver is what increases the range of a Bluetooth Low Energy link. Now we're going from single room coverage all the way to whole house coverage.

Our team out in Norway actually tested 1.5 kilometers of range over a Bluetooth 5 link and in outdoor line of sight conditions. This is very impressive compared to where Bluetooth 4.0 and Bluetooth 4.2 range previously was.

And the next feature of Bluetooth 5 is the new high speed mode. Historically, BLE was at a one megabit per second throughput. Now with Bluetooth 5, you can leverage a two megabits per second PHY. This is critical for applications that want to be moving at a faster pace, especially for over the air firmware updates. Now you can do this twice as fast.

The one key thing to keep in mind, though, as much as we want to leverage every possible new feature, the long range and high speed features, this is a spectrum. So either you can leverage the new long range, or you can leverage the higher speed. You aren't able to use both new features at one time, as the longer range does imply a lower speed or a lower data rate.

Now, the third feature of Bluetooth 5 is called advertising extensions. This enables the ability to transmit more intelligent data over a beacon with increased broadcasting capacity. This is achieved by offloading the advertising channels and utilizing the 37 data channels to transmit the advertisement payload. This reduces the load on the advertising channels and can improve many beacon and connectionless type of applications, such as indoor navigation, asset tracking, or any way finding applications. The advertisement extension feature also is what enables a device to initiate and connect at long range.

Now that we've looked at all three of the features of Bluetooth 5, let's see some of the applications that are benefiting from Bluetooth 5. We'll take a look at the far left. Starting in home and building automation, whether it's your smart door lock, smoke detectors, doorbells, even your coffee machine, you now can control these products at a longer range with your smartphone.

Then if we take a look at some of the industrial applications, whether it's large scale warehouses where you're tracking heavy or expensive machinery, maybe you're tracking power tools across a large site. These can all benefit from Bluetooth 5 long range mode. A few other applications are automotive, having wire replacement within a vehicle, being able to use your smartphone as a key or passive entry, passive start. Even in health and medical, your patient monitoring patches to measure patient vitals, your blood glucose monitors, even drug delivery injectors, those can be enhanced using Bluetooth 5, whether it's long range or having an improved user experience with a new high speed mode.

And then lastly, retail. This is an area where, whether it's an e POS reader or even within your grocery store, maybe having a beacon connecting to your smartphone app, this can be enhanced using advertising extensions. So you'll see here that there's a plethora of applications that Bluetooth Low Energy can be used in, and Bluetooth 5 is really bringing a big advantage across all of these markets.

And with that, we're going to take a look in a little bit deeper into a few more applications where Bluetooth 5 is really making an impact. We're going to start with smart door locks. So I'm about to start my new project. I'm wanting to design a door lock. Where should I go first to begin that? Here, it's all on TI.com. So if we go on TI.com under the Applications path, we can click on Building Automation. We can click on Electronic Smart Lock. And here's a perfect place to start. We have a block diagram highlighting all the main features of a smart door lock. You'll see the main MCU. You'll see the motor drive. We'll see the different user interface options, the power management blcoks, and then, of course, the wireless interface portion.

And if we look at that piece, we see that there are a few options for wireless protocols. And since we're focused on BLE, we can click on that, and we can find out more information on a BLE enabled smart door lock. Here, there are references to reference designs, TI designs, even a place to see how to add capacitive touch if I'm looking to design maybe a more industrial type of control panel.

And with smart door locks, this is a great opportunity to leverage the long range future of Bluetooth 5. Imagine you're in your home. It's a two story home. You're upstairs in your office. You want to be able to check if your door was locked at night. And you're able to do this now with the Bluetooth 5 long range mode.

Let's take a look at another example. This is a BLE beacon, also available on TI.com. And this is a huge area of growth for Bluetooth Low Energy, whether it's in offices, sports stadiums, retail, or even museums. Beacons can be used for many connectionless type of applications. It's meant to enable way finding within an arena or within a grocery store. You're able to receive coupons. And then even in museums, you'll see there's a museum app, and as you're standing in front of a painting, you can actually receive a beacon to find out more specifics on, who was that painter? What time period was this portrait done?

And here with these resources on TI.com, I can learn more about, how would I support I Beacon or Eddystone beacon formats? Or maybe I want to create my own custom beacon format. How can I do that with the TI SDK? You'll see a few other benefits here are leveraging the enhanced privacy features of Bluetooth 4.2, as well as leveraging the advertising extension features of Bluetooth 5 to really send richer data over a beacon.

Now let's take a look at another example. Here, we're on environmental sensors. This is also found on TI.com on the Applications path. An environmental sensor is a really broad application. It could be temperature, it could be humidity, or even light, as a few examples.

So imagine you're creating a smart thermostat system from scratch in your home, and you want to be able to monitor and control the air temperature within each room of your house. Maybe your basement, you don't want to regulate as much, but the children's rooms or the kitchen, you want to be able to individually adapt the temperature settings in a room by room basis. This is now possible with Bluetooth Low Energy temperature sensors within each room of your home. Since you're leveraging BLE, this is a very low power protocol, so you can run these temperature sensors off of a coin cell battery. And using Bluetooth 5, now you can leverage long range to control these settings from a farther distance in your home. This solution will also pair with many of TI's high precision sensing solutions, and you can find more details here by clicking on the sensing block on TI.com.

Now that we've looked at a few different Bluetooth 5 use cases, let's take a look at, what would be the advantage of leveraging multiple protocols in a single product? Here, we're going to look at an example of a large scale network of smart door locks. So say you are within a hotel, and this hotel has all the door locks connected over a long range low power sub 1 GHz network. This enables the front desk to be able to program and configure all of these locks, or even in a maintenance or maid service situation, they can control all the locks from one central source at the front desk.

But if you're leveraging sub 1 GHz and Bluetooth Low Energy on a single chip, now you can use BLE for a phone as your key. So as you check into the hotel, you never have to worry about, oh, did I bring my key with me? Did I deactivate my key because I left it too close to my smartphone? All of those worries melt away, because now your smartphone becomes your key, and you can use that to unlock your hotel room.

Another example of where you can leverage multiple protocols is, say you have a large scale smoke detector system. Here, we're looking at more of an industrial environment. This also could be applicable in a home setting, as well. But you'll see that the smoke detectors are installed up high, hard to reach places. And so instead of needing to climb a ladder to either configure the smoke detector or update the firmware of the smoke detector, now you can leverage Bluetooth Low Energy for in field over the air firmware updates. This really simplifies it by being able to use your smartphone to update the firmware, and you never have to step on a ladder.

A third example of multi protocol is here, Bluetooth Low Energy plus Zigbee. So let's say you've just bought some new products that you want to retrofit in your home-- some new smart products, specifically. For example, some new Zigbee enabled light bulbs. As you open up the box, you're getting these light bulbs, you want to be able to configure these new light bulbs into your network. And now you can use your smartphone to do that and then fully deploy and set up the smart light bulbs across your home.

So based on these examples, we've really seen how beneficial Bluetooth Low Energy can be to a myriad of products. And it also can be used with other protocols for commissioning, configuring, any device diagnostics, just basic smartphone control, or over the air firmware updates.

So now, how do we get started? Let's take a look at TI.com/BLE. Very easy website to remember. And as we go to that link, we'll be able to browse through the latest offering of TI's Bluetooth Low Energy wireless MCUs. You'll see here that, on the far right, we have our ARM Cortex M3 based SoC's, and then on the far left, we have our newest device, which is ARM Cortex M4F based. And these wireless MCUs can be used as a standalone SoC, or they can be used in a network processor configuration if you already have a host MCU in your system.

A few key benefits that I want to point out is that, with the CC2640 R2F, this is actually the smallest Bluetooth 5 solution in the market, coming in at 2.7 by 2.7 millimeter wafer chip scale package offering. The CC2640 R2F also comes in a Q100 automotive qualified device. This is actually rated up to 105 C, so it can also be useful in any industrial applications that require a higher temperature range.

And then on the far left, the CC2642 R, this is our newest device that is now sampling on TI.com, fully supporting all the features of Bluetooth 5, and has the Bluetooth 5 stack in ROM so that there is the maximum amount of application code space available for you. And you'll see here that it is industry leading standby current consumption at only 0.9 micro amps, which is very crucial for any battery powered BLE solution.

Another piece of devices that I want to highlight are our multi-protocol solutions. So this is also on TI.com under the Multistandard tab. Here, we'll see dual band and multi-protocol wireless MCU's that support Bluetooth Low Energy, plus another wireless technology. So if we start on the far left, we'll see the CC1352 R. This device concurrently supports sub 1 GHz plus 2.4, so this would be very applicable in the examples that we talked through that leverage 7 gigahertz plus Bluetooth Low Energy. This device is also coming soon with an integrated 20 dBm PA onboard. This can be very beneficial, either for your sub 1 GHz network or for your BLE network to enable longer range.

And then lastly, on the far right, we have the CC2652 R. This has the benefit of leveraging any 2.4 gigahertz protocol so that you can do BLE and Zigbee on a single chip. All these devices are ARM Cortex M4 based, extremely low power, and enable you maximum flexibility for your application.

Now that we've looked through the silicon and the device offerings for Bluetooth 5, let's take a look at what EVM's we would use to get started. So for on TI.com/BLE, we can click on the Tools and Software tab, and here, it's going to take me to the SimpleLink development kits. On the far left, we have the CC26X2 LaunchPad, which is meant for evaluation of the CC2642 for BLE only or the CC2652 if you want BLE plus another 2.4 gigahertz protocol. On the far right, we have the CC2640 R2F LaunchPad development kit. Both of these kits are very low cost, easy to use development kits, and they are fully supported with many different application examples, and we also have our out of box project zero sample. This is where you'll do basic LED blinking or button pressing and see that feedback on a simple BLE smartphone application so that you can get started, see that you have a BLE connection working with your phone, and then launch your development from there.

And with these development kits, it's going to lead us to which software that you'll use for these devices. So if we're still on the TI.com/BLE Tools and Software tab, here, we're going to look at, what is the SimpleLink software offerings? You'll see both SDKs, one for the CC26X2 platform and one for the CC2640 R2F platform. Within these SDKs, you'll see the multiple different protocols stocks that are included, and these are all royalty free software stacks that are available for you to download on TI.com. And these are supported by IIR, as well as TI's Code Composer Studio desktop, as well as Code Composer Studio cloud, which are free IDE's for you to leverage.

With that software, we have another unique feature that's available for you as you're getting started with your Bluetooth Low Energy development and your development across any of the SimpleLink MCUs. And it's called SimpleLink Academy. This is really meant to make you feel like you're back in your university days. It's going to take you through comprehensive training at a self-paced experience, where you can go lab by lab, step by step through different training and different videos that has been curated by our wireless experts here at TI.

If we look specifically at Bluetooth, you'll see the offerings here for the labs for Bluetooth 5. These labs cover a broad span of topics. You'll see, at the top, we have the BLE fundamentals. This is where you can start your project zero, which is the basic application for Bluetooth Low Energy. You also can learn how to set up your debug environment, how can you read and write characteristics, and how can you even change the advertisement or device name.

That leads into a tutorial on how to do scanning and advertising with the TI BLE stack. We also have a tutorial on how to do set up BLE connections. And how do you know the key concepts of what's a master and what's a slave, and what are the specific connection parameters that you need to implement?

Next, you'll see a lab that is catered specifically to the two megabits per second PHY on Bluetooth 5. And then we'll walk through, how do you build a custom profile? This lab is really critical. It's going to explain the [INAUDIBLE] protocols of Bluetooth Low Energy, and it's really a walkthrough of, how do you implement a custom Bluetooth service based on the APIs that are provided in TI's SDK?

And this leads to basic code generation for any custom service that you want to implement in your product. And then lastly within this lab set, we have one that's specifically focused on over the air firmware updates or over the air downloads. This will help walk you through how to perform an over the air download, what are the different factory images, how can you add an over the air download to any existing product that you have, and then what are some debugging or advanced techniques that you can leverage?

So this is all curated content that is available on TI.com to walk you through the basics all the way to the advanced features of Bluetooth Low Energy. And since we're focused on Bluetooth 5, I just want to spend a minute walking through one of our Bluetooth 5 training modules that we have within SimpleLink Academy. Here, this module is specifically focused on Bluetooth 5 and the high speed mode. Within this lab, it will walk through, how do you maintain a connection using the new two megabits per second PHY, what are the benefits of using the 2 megabit per second PHY, and also just how to set up that initial connection. So you can walk through these at your own pace. And this tutorial will only take about two hours to complete and can be very beneficial so that you now are leveraging Bluetooth 5 in your application.

With that, I want to wrap up with a few resources that we have available. Everything in this webinar was all on TI.com, so you can use that for reference. We've also included a few more additional links on some of the protocols that we didn't spend as much time on. So you'll see sub 1 GHz, Thread, Zigbee, or multi standard devices, as well as on TI.com/simplelink, you can find out more information on our ethernet based wired MCUs, as well as our SimpleLink Wi-Fi products.

Within TI.com, not only do we have information on our hardware and software, but we also have additional information on specific end equipments-- say you're building products within building automation, HVAC, grid infrastructure-- we have more of those block diagrams that we walk through, all on TI.com. And then, lastly, if you're building a solution that is going all the way from an end node or an end sensor all the way up to the cloud, we do have a SimpleLink sensor to cloud solution that enables you to have low power sensor nodes that are connected through a gateway all the way up to cloud, and we can leverage our cloud service providers like AWS and IBM or Microsoft Azure. And then the last piece that I want to highlight is on the far right, is that we have extensive support and training all available on TI.com.

With that, I would like to thank you all for joining this webinar today. This wraps up all the information that I'd like to share. I hope that you find this very useful as you're starting your Bluetooth 5 development. Feel free to check out these resources that we've included. And then if you have any additional questions, I would highly recommend that you post on our E2E community forum, which our TI teams monitor around the clock, and they'd be happy to answer any additional questions. So visit E2E.TI.com to post a question, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks.