Normal Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy

[Vicent Tse]

Hi all, I'm puzzled about the relationship between normal BT and BLE, Is BLE connection is based on normal BL connection? And if it's integrant to set up a BL connection before using BLE connection? Thanks!

[Paul]

Don't think there is any relationship between the normal BT and BLE except the frequency.

[Vicent Tse]

Thanks for response. So it means that we could set up a BLE connection between two BLE device regardless BT ? For mobile phone, BLE and BT are just two different wireless technologies ?

[Stefan Birnir Sverrisson]

Hi Vicent

All Nordic BLE chips do not support classic Bluetooth, i.e. our chips do not support Bluetooth BR/EDR.

[Vicent Tse]

Thanks for your response, Stefan. So you mean that all the pair requests from chips are for BLE connection? Once my device begins advertising, on my iPhone, in SETTINGS-->BLUETOOTH, I find that iPhone would connect my device automatically, is this connection a BLE connection? And sometimes, the connection would change between disconnected and connected randomly, I even guess that our device is broken. I'm appreciative if you could give more idea? Thank you.

[Ole Morten]

In practice, there isn't really anything in common between BLE and Bluetooth Classic except for the name. :-)

Most BLE devices will not show up in the Bluetooth settings of iOS except if they're already bonded (sometimes called paired) or currently connected. If you download a new firmware to an already bonded device, you'll most likely have to delete the old bond information from the iOS device to make things work again, and this can be done by tapping the device in the settings and choosing "Forget this device". Also, beware that HID over GATT devices and ANCS devices will show up in the settings, but not any others.

In theory, two devices could be connected both over BLE and Bluetooth Classic simultaneously, but this would require both devices to be so-called dual-mode, in other words capable of supporting both technologies. As Stefan says, all our devices are single-mode BLE devices, and only supports BLE.

(One could argue that this isn't strictly correct, since they do share some of the lower levels of the stack to a certain degree, but in practice, this doesn't really show up at the application level.)