When I first came on board at the Bluetooth SIG, I started asking questions about tools, processes, and technologies to understand everything I could aboutBluetooth® Smart. Once I understood how everything went together, we created a couple of tools to make developing with Bluetooth quicker and easier—theApplication Accelerator and Smart Starter Kit. Then we thought, “We can do better.” So, we brainstormed about this…a lot. How could we add value to developers by shortening the product development lifecycle? Where could we help and make things even easier? We centered on a few core tenets:

1. Get developers what they need quickly while reducing the learning curve—Bluetooth has a LOT of great documentation…a lot. As the technology advances, it gets harder for devs to keep up with the changes in just the GATT technology. Add to this the concepts of creating custom profiles—use cases for how a device should function in your solution—and we really needed to make this easy so developers didn’t need to read a massive document.
2. Integration—there are a ton of great tools out there for creating device-side (and client-side) code. Compilers, IDEs, systems…a lot of good tools. We wanted to plug into the tools that developers are already using. We didn’t want to create a whole new tool chain. While we wanted to make something that was a good tool and easy to use, it had to be flexible enough to allow for integration into other tool chains.
3. Community is a powerful thing—there are great ideas surrounding Bluetooth and projects—from hobbyists and makers to large OEMs/ODMs and everything in between. We wanted to give everyone a place where they could share ideas. Maybe you have an awesome reference implementation for a specific module. Maybe you have a great set of custom servicesused to carry out actions between devices—for bringing the smart home to life. We wanted a way for people to socialize their innovation in a simple way, and tie it back into their innovative ideas.

With these tenets in mind, we started to explore different ideas. We bounced them off many of you. We received great insights and began to quantify the benefits a simple tool could bring to new Bluetooth developers.

The Bluetooth Developer Studio is the result of that effort. It allows you to use existing adoptedprofiles, or create your own custom services, in the same graphical tool. You don’t have to poke around strung-together XML files, and then parse them to get what you want. You don’t have to read a 3,000 page specification to see how the GATT-based services hang together. You can interact with those things in real-time via this powerful new development tool.

We created a simple, straightforward plugin infrastructure that can be used to create integration points with just about any other tool chain. The only real requirement is that the output from Studio and the input to another tool chain is text. You can use plugins to create stub-code and import it into your compiler of choice (whether that is C/C++ code, Java, or even BASIC). We looked at the client-side of the equation too, so you can even create plug-ins that can create the stub-code for an Android or iOS app.

Finally, we created a secure place for sharing your ideas with the community. Instead of investing in engineering resources to create and maintain your own SDKs, perhaps you could create a reference implementation, publish the custom Bluetooth services that you created, and share that with the community. You can then use the native Bluetooth APIs of the various clients’ platforms to access those services easily and in a consistent way.

Getting to the launch of the Bluetooth Developer Studio has been a very long journey, but really, this is just the beginning. Going forward, we will extend the tool as you suggest new features and ways to use it. And as the Bluetooth core technology adds new functionality, so will developer studio.

What can you do today? Sign up for the beta program. With limited availability, the sooner you sign up, the better your chances are to experience this revolutionary tool and provide the feedback that will make it a great experience for everyone. This is your opportunity to help us make the Bluetooth developer community stronger—it’s your Bluetooth playground.

(Credit: Steve Hegenderfer)