Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) is an RF protocol that enables you to connect your IX15 to another device. Both devices must have BLE enabled.

The IX15 provides Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity through the XBee device interface. The XBee device is able to work in dual mode: XBee protocol + Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).

For example, you can use your cellphone to connect to the XBee device of the IX15, and then from your phone, interact with the IX15 using the XBee Python API.

Digi created the Digi XBee Mobile SDK, a set of libraries, examples and documentation that help you develop mobile applications to interact with XBee devices through their BLE interface. For this purpose, we provide two easy-to-use libraries that allow you to create XBee mobile native apps:

• XBee Library for Xamarin, to develop cross-platform mobile applications using C# language —iOS and Android.
• XBee Library for Android, to develop Android applications using Java.

The XBee is the server and allows client devices, such as a cellphone, to configure the XBee or data transfer with the User Data Relay frame. The XBee cannot communicate with another XBee over BLE, as the XBee is strictly a BLE server. The possibilities are:

• XBee 3: can communicate with mobile devices over BLE.
• XBee 3: can communicate with third party devices such as the Nordic nRF and SiLabs BGM over BLE.
• XBee 3: cannot communicate with another XBee 3 over BLE.