Orem, UT — (press release excerpt) — Rappore Technologies has announced a reduced footprint Bluetooth stack subset meant for use in highly constrained microcontroller-based embedded devices. The tiny Bluetooth stack, known as “Bluetooth On Chip”, handles Bluetooth commands and events and fits in less than 4KB of ROM memory.

Bluetooth On Chip enables Bluetooth master devices to simultaneously control multiple slave devices. Implementing a subset of the complete library of Bluetooth Specification 1.1 functions, the stack contains over a dozen embedded Bluetooth commands and events for sending and receiving Bluetooth radio instructions.

Rappore Technologies prototyped Bluetooth On Chip on the MICROCHIP PIC17XXX family of microcontrollers, and plans to port to other microcontrollers such as the Intel MCS51 family. Having been designed to reside in microcontroller ROM memory, the stack operates without any operating system (OS) dependencies. The result is no need for OS-dependent Bluetooth drivers or protocol stacks to add Bluetooth capabilities to a device. Depending upon memory availability and device interoperability requirements, versions of embedded Bluetooth On Chip can scale to support additional Bluetooth host protocol stack layers and multiple Bluetooth device types.

Although Bluetooth on Chip is initially being targeted to very small microcontroller based embedded systems, it can also be ported to Embedded Linux based targets given sufficient customer demand. Additionally, a fully compliant Bluetooth stack, requiring around 100KB memory, is available as a standard off-the-shelf product for Embedded Linux based system designs.

Bluetooth On Chip is delivered as object code to link to a specific micro controller, or on partner-supplied, embedded hardware with customized pin configurations. Available now, Rappore's Bluetooth On Chip includes object code, professional services, developer instructions, and a license.

 
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