Reference Design For Bluetooth LE Gateway For Thermostats

Design engineers can accelerate development, reduce costs, and innovate across industries beyond smart homes by using modular components, intuitive GUIs, and cloud connectivity.

The growing demand for connected systems across industries like smart homes, healthcare, industrial IoT, and retail necessitates efficient, scalable, and cost-effective solutions. Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) technology, with its low power consumption, affordability, and scalability, addresses these requirements effectively. This reference design empowers design engineers to rapidly prototype and develop modular, reusable solutions for multi-node Bluetooth LE connectivity.

This solution by Mircochip Technology highlights a wireless thermostat application that combines Bluetooth LE 5.2 and Wi-Fi technologies to facilitate the real-time collection, control, and monitoring of temperature data. By integrating a PIC32CZ CA microcontroller-based gateway and RNBD451 Bluetooth LE modules, it ensures seamless communication between nodes and the cloud. This integration not only simplifies development for engineers but also accelerates time to market.

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This reference design offers several advantages. It allows engineers to quickly transition from concept to prototype through its modular design, which is also expandable and reusable across different tools. It supports multi-link Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi integration using the PIC32CZ CA microcontroller and provides cloud-enabled monitoring with AWS IoT, streamlining advanced analytics. By leveraging MPLAB Harmony 3 libraries, the solution reduces costs and development time, making it highly efficient.

The Bluetooth LE gateway in this design acts as a bridge, connecting Bluetooth LE devices to larger network infrastructures like the cloud. It performs essential functions, including data collection from sensors and wearables, transmitting data to cloud servers for processing, enabling remote monitoring, and translating protocols between Bluetooth LE and other networks like Wi-Fi or Ethernet. This versatile design supports various use cases, such as connecting and controlling devices in smart homes (e.g., thermostats and lighting), facilitating patient monitoring through wearables in healthcare, gathering data from industrial IoT sensors, and improving inventory management and customer tracking in retail environments.

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This wireless thermostat reference design features a central control panel (PIC32CZ_CA90) as the main Bluetooth LE node, connecting to two peripheral nodes via RNBD451 modules. It requests and displays temperature data on a maXTouch graphics display and sends it to the WFI32 IoT gateway for AWS cloud monitoring. The first peripheral node (PIC32CM_LS60) acts as a GATT server, updating temperature data and triggering LED alerts for threshold breaches. The second node (WBZ451) reads temperature from an MCP9700A sensor and triggers LED alerts for breaches. The design offers low power consumption, scalability, and flexibility for wireless thermostat applications across industries.

Microchip has tested this reference design. It comes with a bill of materials (BOM), schematics, assembly drawing, printed circuit board (PCB) layout, and more. The company’s website has additional data about the reference design. To read more about this reference design, click here.