BLE

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

Chances are, your customers used to think of Bluetooth as a consumer wireless technology. Bluetooth is a personal area networking (PAN) specification for communications over short distances, between points up to 20 meters away.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE or Bluetooth LE) has changed all of that. BLE makes it possible to communicate, quickly and accurately, over a range of around 200 meters.

At Omni-ID, you will find BLE at work in our new Sense range of IoT devices, alongside LoRaWAN and GPS, helping to ensure cost-effective, highly accurate communications between sensors within range.

SenseIoT Asset Management and Logistics Series

An evolving series of intelligent and robust devices for tracking important or valuable assets accurately and cost-effectively over longer distances.

Sense Asset

Our SenseIoT device with BLE, temperature sensor, accelerometer and Hall effect sensor offers smartphone-compatible asset-tracking communications over distances of up to 200 meters. Data can be sent via WiFi, LAN or cellular networks and to a cloud server or a locally hosted client application server.

Download a datasheet on Sense Asset.

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Versus the original Bluetooth, BLE slashes power consumption and cost. A simple coin-cell powered BLE based tag or beacon transmitting data multiple times a second can last for over five years. In addition, BLE is natively supported by popular mobile operating systems from iOS, Android, Windows Phone and even BlackBerry, as well as macOS, Linux, Windows 8 and Windows 10. It can become a key part of achieving energy-efficient device to device communications within a sophisticated, wide-ranging multi-point infrastructure.

How BLE works

Enhance asset management

How BLE works with SenseIoT

Omni-ID’s Sense BLE IoT devices gather and bundle sensor data internally, transmitting this to physical gateways that in turn ‘talk’ to their network (whether WiFi, LAN or cellular) via a cloud or local server. Tags incorporate a unique ID, with data communicated at configurable intervals or, typically, default or alert ‘beacon rates’, without awareness of the transmitted message. A suitable BLE Gateway or other BLE listening device in range will collect the incoming data for processing. This may mean forwarding the data to the application server, or processing the data further before sending it on. Communications between tag and gateway are usually only one way.

Due to their simplicity and price point compared to UHF RFID readers or LoRaWAN gateways, many BLE gateways can be installed in areas of high tag density —  further enhancing reading and processing speed.

View and compare all Sense devices

Enhanced asset management and cost control

BLE-enhanced tagging can help you or your customer track and manage assets from parts and tools to containers, materials and fleets of vehicles, whether you’re in construction, intermodal, oil & gas, transportation, manufacturing & logistics, mining, facilities and production management, warehousing, or government & defense.