Laird BLE Module Enables Self-Powered Wireless Wind Sensor

This week, Etesian Technologies released their latest self-powered wind gauge. The patented BreezeBT is a completely wireless Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) integrated anemometer that sends wind speed measurements straight to your phone without ever changing a battery or running cables. The ultra-low power performance of Laird’s certified BLE module, the BL600, enables the BreezeBT to operate on wind-power alone.

Measuring wind speed is crucial for ensuring safety in environments like industrial, marine, and outdoor staging. On job sites that require large cranes, running cables great distances can be time consuming and costly. These setups also run the risk of batteries dying. For example, if the anemometer’s battery goes dead while a crane is operating, operations would have to halt until the unit can be serviced. Embedded with Laird’s BL600 BLE module, the BreezeBT bypasses all of these issues. The device wirelessly collects and sends data as far as 110 meters (360 feet), relieving the expense, labor, and risks of wired and battery powered setups.

For Etesian, a key design aspect was the ability to utilize the BL600’s smartBASIC programming language, an implementation of a structured BASIC programming language. smartBASIC is designed to make BLE technology development quicker and simpler, vastly cutting down time to market. “That was a really big plus—the idea that I could program in a language that I was familiar with and had all of these features built in got me from A to B in a very short period of time,” explains Founder and CTO of Etesian Technologies, Bill Stein. “I started development of this new sensor early in January and I had a working prototype by mid- February.”

What is smartBASIC?

Laird’s smartBASIC acts as the bridge between software and hardware, enabling an application written for one smartBASIC radio to work on any other. The even driven smartBASIC language, unique to the wireless industry, offers built-in functions that replace thousands of lines of C code with a few abstracted lines of smartBASIC, allowing you to leverage Laird’s years of Bluetooth expertise. Equipped with this programming language, the BL600 Series, BT900, and the RM1xx (LoRa + BLE module) dramatically simplify application development to reduce your time to market.

How Does it Work?

Developed for an embedded environment, smartBASIC’s paradigm is event driven, causing functions and subroutines to be triggered by external and internal activities. Built in functions and subroutines are featured in smartBASIC, which exposes an easy to use API to various hardware peripherals embedded in the device. These built in functions and subroutines are written in ‘C’ by Laird and bind to appropriately named functions for smartBASIC app developers. User functions and subroutines are also written by smartBASIC developers to help with writing code that is simpler and easier to maintain. It is the user functions that bind to event handlers. A sample of a smartBASIC application demonstrating this paradigm is illustrated below.

Check out our smartBASIC for BLE webpage to learn more.

Click here for more information about Etesian’s BreezeBT.