Nope. If you want to just stay local, you can. We will have ways to change everything about the connection, so you can customize anything.
Yes. You can just take the accelerometer data and hand it to your own app. You can control where the data goes. And we will have example apps to work from as well
That depends a bit on what you are doing. If it just connects and stays connected but never transmits data (and no LEDs on or anything), it can last many months. If you disconnect sometimes and totally sleep, it will last years. If you hook up a bunch of LEDs and send data like crazy, I’m sure you can kill a battery in a matter of hours! Connection interval will impact it too. So with lower connection intervals you get higher throughput, but lower battery life. So there will be a wide range depending on your application.
Hope that answered everything, let me know if you have concerns or more questions, I am very open to feedback to improve the product.
This looks great @bheliker love the way you are smoothing the movement of the cube
@eely22 I was wondering because Im trying to cut the cords on gyros, accelerometers to send data with OSC. Ive tried it with the sparkcore and theirs a lag … to be honest, I didnt try without the clouds so im not sure if I would gain latency without it. OSC sends data over UDP and knowing the UDP bug with the SparkCore do you think its even possible to you to send OSC UDP data with the SparkLE?
@eely22 are there any components on the underside of the Bluz? im just wondering if its possible to for you to offer a module like the P1 for the photon.
I have a project i have been working on with the cc2541 for the last few months… but have really hit the wall with development as I’m struggling with callbacks and don’t really understand low level programming. thats where the power of the spark comes in i can understand arduino style code enough to get me by
I would prefer a module that i can put on my own board with the sensors i require and a coin cell battery, that way i can keep the size and cost down. i hope to have a really simple design without any switches led’s or anything, just the module and a pressure sensor and gyro/accelerometer.
And 2 other quick things… how much flash and ram is left on the Bluz? and whats the correct pronunciation of Bluz?
You can send data from Bluz through UDP. The normal data flow is from Bluz to the cloud, but there is no reason you couldn’t route it over UDP instead. The gateway will provide ways to do this, but you can also program it yourselves to re-route as the gateways will just be a Core/Photon (or an app, which will be open source too)
I am currently planning to offer Bluz as the Photon would come, so there are no components on the underside and the entire Bluz board can be soldered down. It is also possible to offer a board with no LEDs and such, but it wouldn’t save much space or cost since the major drivers there are the BLE module and the external SPI flash, which would be required on the “P1 like” module.
Bluz will come with 32K RAM, but 8k is taken by the BLE stack. So it will have 24k available. The firmware is similar to the Core, so you can say it will have 4k RAM more than that.
For Flash, 152K is available in the standard config (256k total - 88k for BLE stack - 16k for bootloader). Out of that 152k, I am currently using 99k for the base firmware, however that is not optimized yet and I expect that number to come down quite a bit. So right now, there is 53k available to the user app, and I expect that to grow significantly before shipping.
The external flash is all allocated for key storage, backup firmware, system flags and OTA updates. That may change based on the success of Kickstarter (more Flash on board sounds like a good stretch goal, doesn’t it?)
Bluz is pronounced like the music, blues.
I hope that covered everything, please let me know if you have more questions or feedback. I love to hear ways to make Bluz better. I have already received a lot of great ideas from this community and I am looking forward to building another great tool in the Spark lineup.
The current boards do have the flash on the bottom. That was really done to get a working board quickly. I’ve already gone through and made sure there is enough room, so the next rev will have everything on top.
As we gear up, just want to thank everyone on the thread who has given feedback over the past 9 or so months, and especially to everyone at Spark for the support and getting the project to this point.
We have been posting some Bluz project ideas on Twitter under #BLE4IoT, so if you have an idea, we would love to hear it! Just post it under the same hashtag, we will be showcasing some of the best throughout the campaign.
i can understand arduino style code enough to get me by 