BLE Central Role, libraries and power saving schemes

[Carl]

Hi 

I am very new to BLE...

We are looking into a new industrial product design that will be battery powered, and be capable of communicating with BLE sensors (Mesh not required), my initial investigation has highlighted that the Central Role is very power hungry, and there are no true out of the box solutions (coding would seem to be required on the BLE module/SoC to implement the Central Role.

I have had a quick look at your development environments, and your 'Bluetooth low energy central tutorial' (pdf only). Are there any additional libraries available? or is it just the API and sample code?

Also what if any power saving scheme/s can be employed on the BLE Central? (and a brief pointer to the implications would be handy)

We do not really need the additional features that Bluetooth V5 introduced (Mesh, long range, and higher data rate), power consumption is key. We are keen to avoid obsolesce, but do not want to incur the increased power requirement s of Bluetooth V5.0, can we have the best of both worlds? (Can your SoCs operate in mode that gives the power advantages of Bluetooth 4.2?)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards

Carl

[Hung Bui]

Hi Carl, 

Could you point me to the place where you found that the central role is power hungry ? 

Central device when in central role (not in observer role) would consume almost the same low power consumption as the peripheral. 

It draws more current when doing scanning (observer role). But you can setup your device to limit the time it stays in observer role. 

One of the way to reduce power consumption is to use 2Mbps mode in Bluetooth 5.0. It's not only about sending data with higher throughput but also reduce the power consumption because data is transferred faster, less on-air time.

You can evaluate our central device using any central example in our SDK. They are located in \examples\ble_central\ folder.