Bluetooth LE Sensor Nodes to Raspberry Pi WiFi Bridge (John Park, Adafruit)

Last Updated on November 1, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org

https://learn.adafruit.com/bluetooth-le-broadcastnet-sensor-node-raspberry-pi-wifi-bridge/overview

The Pyloton has as far as I know no standard interface like LabstreamingLayer or MQTT. The Pyloton software needs to be connected to the Pyloton –> Pi –> AIO.

At first sight, the whole project looks difficult, but one has to work through it, and I think it can be made easier. What is great about this project is, that it already has three BLE profiles, heart rate, speed an cadence.

There are two ANT+ projects developed by PhDs. One PhD. ported the ANT+ stick to a Rasperri PI, one made an instruction to read power data from an ANT+ device, which can be modified for other purposes. Another PhD developed a device to sniff out BLE sensor data from a Peloton.

For the Adafruit BLE sports sensor project, no PhD is required, as far as I can see. It is great that there is already a path there to the Adafruit cloud.

Most of the ANT+ sports sensor profiles are also available for BLE. Only some are missing, for instance bike radar. This is what I have learned from DC Rainmaker.

I think John Park did really a great job with this setup, which should be promoted. It can be connected to Adafruit software platforms from the beginning. This makes it easy to start with.

I reviewed solutions to read out BLE sensor data from the Adafruit Pyloton, which I knew before I discovered the solution from John Park Adafruit:

https://petergamma.org/read-out-sensor- … e-pyloton/

For several years, I was looking for a way to access sensor data from ANT+ and BLE sports sensors, which was quite frustrating, none of them is easy:

https://github.com/PeterGamma/Live-stre … ensor-data

The Pyloton –> Pi –> AIO path is easier, and could solve this problem. If all the people who developed these different solutions in the past would work on a new BLE project for sports sensor streaming, a new community could emerge, and also simple people could become developers wo build their own open source sports devices.

Peter Gamma 21.5.2021

I forgot to mention some PhDs. which solved the problem of an ANT+ or BLE or ECG live-streaming. These where: Johannes Bader, PhD, Darren Haghue, PhD, Imran S. Haque, PhD, Dr. Ing. Rainer Blind, Scott S. Harden, PhD, MD with a sound card ECG device, Hugo Plácido da Silva, PhD. from Bitalino. There where others from well known companies, like Dave Lusty from Microsoft UK, Matlab with a BLE example who solved the problem of physiological sensor live-streaming. Also other great programers offered a solution like Ivor Powell, Niels Knieling any many more. Happy that John Park from Adafruit has also to offer a great solution.

but unfortunately:

Peter Gamma 22.5.2021