Links
- Nice page with a bunch of links to blue tooth stacks and hardware: http://www.palowireless.com/Bluetooth/devtools.asp
- How bluetooth works: http://www.bluetooth.com/Bluetooth/Technology/Works/
Intel Tech papers
Overview from Intel
Intel's software stack
Integrating bluetooth to embedded systems
Jargon
When searching for bluetooth — look for "bluetooth chip" or "bluetooth singlechip". It seems the standard way to divide up the bluetooth modules happens to be:
- Bluetooth transceiver and antenna
- Bluetooth baseband controller
- Bluetooth codec modules (may be integrated into baseband chip)
- Flash
The baseband controller tends to have USB and UART support (sometimes PCM for audio) to talk to the external host and they encapsulate the 'MAC' layer, the encryptions and foo and part of the HCI transport layer.
HCI is "host controller interface" and is the transport layer for bluetooth (think 'TCP/IP' equivalent for bluetooth).
Single-chip Bluetooth
Notes
- All SoCs are surface mount BGA or CSP
- Difficult to "solder" or interface with without robotically built CADed board
- Consider getting larger easier-to-interface Bluetooth solutions
Examples
- Broadcom SoC on the .13um process
- CSR BlueCore chips. Various sized Bluetooth implementations (.18um, EDR, 2.0, etc.)
Complete DIP Bluetooth Solutions
Notes
Examples
- DIP Roving Networks Bluetooth breakout version. Very cute from sparkfun. Robust AT commands.
- Bluetooth Modem - BlueSMiRF Gold Advertises to be a transparent serial Rx/Tx pipe. Less flexibility, but a MUCH smaller pin count we have to interface, integrated antenna, and ease of use.
Misc Solutions
- Atmel has solutions but I can only find a solution that needs us to buy 3 or 4 different chips AT76C551, T7023, maybe T7024 and flash memory.
- Motorola's solution This seems to have a CD-ROM sized dev board
- Broadcom's solution Not much of a tech document. Need to search this more.
- SONY seems to have something similar to Atmel.
- Infenion's solution Seems to have some choice — its a single chip system that is class 2 (~10m range) and we can choose the type of firmware we want (serial or HCI)
- ST Microelectronic Uses an ARM controller and ericsson's baseband chip. Nice features — it has a deep sleep mode drawing 25 muA and a sleep mode taking 1.5 mA. It uses ~20mA for data transfer at 172.8kbps symmetric. Seems pretty good platform in terms for software support. It has JTAG, HCI stack etc. Boris should look into the hardware suitability.
- National Semiconductors has a bluetooth-serial chip but it needs an external antenna and crystals.
- Ericsson
- http://www.csr.com/products/bc5range.htm more for headsets (has stereo codec) but says it has an on chip lithium battery charger
A list of a lot of bluetooth things but it has a lot of dead links also
All (most?) of the above happen to be fine pitch BGA chips. Is this going to be a problem in terms of getting the package to interact with our AVR or something like that
