Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a part of the Bluetooth standard aimed at bringing wireless technology to low-power devices, and it's getting into everything - lightbulbs, robots, personal health and fitness devices, and plenty more. One of the main advantages of BLE is that everybody can integrate those devices into their tools or projects.

However, BLE is not the most developer-friendly protocol and these devices most of the time don't come with good documentation. In addition, there are not a lot of good open-source tools, examples, and tutorials on how to use Python with BLE. Especially if one wants to build both sides of the communication.

In this talk, I will introduce the concepts and properties used in BLE interactions and look at how we can use the Linux Bluetooth Stack (Bluez) to communicate with other devices. We will look at a simple example and learn along the way about common pitfalls and debugging options while working with BLE and Python.

This talk is for everybody that has a basic understanding of Python and wants to have a deeper understanding of how BLE works and how one could use it in a private project.

Bruno Vollmer

Affiliation: biped

I am the CTO of biped.ai, the AI Copilot for blind and visually impaired people that leverage advanced computer vision to guide them.

During my Masters at RWTH Aachen I worked at several Start-Ups as a software engineer. I've gained experience in Computer Vision and Machine Learning as well as general software engineering areas.