Building High Quality Bluetooth Products | SwaraLink Technologies's Sandeep Kamath
our philosophy is that you know if you want to build a great Bluetooth product let's say you have an idea for a product you don't necessarily want to be spending your time becoming a Bluetooth expert you want to spend your time focusing on what your product is doing if let's say You're Building A wearable sensor there's probably some something cool that you're trying to do well we we think that you should be focusing your time on building something cool not on understanding how how Bluetooth works hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcast presented by iot for all the number one publication and resource for the internet of things I'm your host Ryan Chacon if you're watching this on YouTube we truly appreciate it give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to our Channel if you have not done so already if you listen to us on a podcast directory like apple podcast please subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as they are out all right on today's episode we have Sandeep kamath CEO and founder of swirling Technologies they are a services and solutions company focused on Bluetooth low energy systems and software so we're going to talk a lot about that we're going to talk about ble with what it really is the role of playing in iot um kind of what is a ble product challenges with deploying vle products how to build high quality Bluetooth products with great user experience things along those lines so a lot of good conversation around a very important technology in the iot space I think get a lot of value out of but before we get into it any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot Market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor Leverage leverages iot Solutions development platform provides everything you need to create TurnKey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything.com that's iot changes everything.com and without further Ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome Sandeep to the iot for all podcast thanks for being here this week thanks Ryan yeah it's great to have you um let's kick this off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself and overview of the company for audience yeah for sure my name is Sandeep kamath and my company is named swarlink Technologies we are a Consulting and services and solutions firm that focuses on Bluetooth low energy technology we we help companies with Hardware development software development mobile app development really anything that involves Bluetooth and Bluetooth energy technology fantastic and tell me um I'd love to hear about the story of kind of how the company came about so you know when you founded the company what kind of opportunity to see in the market how did the idea for the company come about and um you know kind of that journey to get you to where you are now sure yeah uh prior to founding swirling Technologies I was working in the semiconductor industry for over a decade and uh most recently I was with a vendor that makes uh chipsets focused on Bluetooth energy technology so uh you know in my role there I had a chance to learn a lot about the technology and also see what the market was like see what customers uh the customers being product developers the challenges that they were facing in uh writing their software to build their products uh so when I uh left my my previous role with a semiconductor vendor uh when I founded swirling Technologies I really wanted to help companies build high quality Bluetooth Energy Products because I'd seen that there were so many products out there that were just unreliable um really just had bad user experiences you know I'd see issues where uh someone would make a product and they're expecting long uh long battery life and the batteries would die after two weeks you know that's that's a really bad user experience another common thing I would see is people would make products where they need to transmit large amounts of data and you have to sit there for for five minutes to transmit data Maybe it's sensor data that's being stored or right various other types of data and I knew that the problem wasn't so much that Bluetooth or Bluetooth energy is not capable of delivering a great user experience the problem really was that uh the software is really complex and when I founded swirling Technologies uh initially the goal was to be a consulting firm and a Services firm to help companies build great products that use Bluetooth technology over time we realized that if we wanted to scale this scale our solution we would actually have to build a software platform that uh kind of encapsulated all these great features of Bluetooth but made it easy for product developers so that that's something that I wanted to talk about today which is something we just launched this last month which is the swirling Bluetooth energy platform nice and so how does I guess without getting too into the details here when it comes to the development of ble products what is what has been the way to build them versus we're using a platform how does that change kind of the experience sure so so the typical experience that uh companies go through is they they download an SDK from their chip vendor um you know and they buy development kits so some common development kits this is a Nordic semiconductors development kit this is one from Silicon labs and they have the the Bluetooth chip on the board and uh when you download the SDK from the chip vendor they usually provide example applications and uh you know there's training there's resources online but usually in order to actually build your product there's a lot of very specific details related to the Bluetooth standard that uh there's a lot of knowledge about Bluetooth that's really required to really understand what you're doing you can try to copy and paste example applications and it it might get you to enable you to hack something together but these are the types of products which um aren't really optimized so if you just kind of copy paste an example application you're going to end up with something that's really basic and it's not necessarily tailored to what you're doing if you look at the the apis from the sdks they use a lot of really Bluetooth specific terminology uh anyone who's tried to develop with Bluetooth might have seen these terms a gap and Gat and ATT and L2 cap and you know essentially it almost comes down to uh you know in order to build a good product you almost have to speak a whole new language and um that's not to say that it's not possible to do I mean there's companies that that have done it right but our philosophy is that you know if if you want to build a great Bluetooth product let's say you have an idea for a product you don't necessarily want to be spending your time becoming a Bluetooth expert you want to spend your time focusing on what your product is doing if let's let's say You're Building A wearable sensor there's probably some something cool that you're trying to do well we we think that you should be focusing your time on building something cool not on understanding how how Bluetooth works right right that totally makes makes a ton of sense I wanted to kind of break away for a second and just just for audience members out there who may not exactly understand kind of what ble is and the role it's playing in this space if you could just quickly high level it for them that'd be fantastic for sure yeah I think uh probably most people are familiar with Bluetooth uh you know Bluetooth headsets Bluetooth speakers I'm talking on airpods right now which which is a Bluetooth product uh so so traditionally Bluetooth had been used for audio applications and and that's primarily it's where it's still used today um in 2009 uh the sorry 2010 the Bluetooth special interest group uh released the Bluetooth 4.0 standard which included Bluetooth energy um what Bluetooth energy did was it kind of simplified I don't want to say it overly simplified things but it kind of changed the Bluetooth protocol to allow for applications that have very low amounts of data that could last for a very long uh time on a battery potentially on a coin cell battery or right you know rechargeable battery that will last a long time so so the example I like to always use that I think a lot of people are familiar with is is Fitbit so fitbit's a product that's been out there for a while and it's a great example of something where there's not a ton of data that really needs to be sent from the the Fitbit to to your phone it's just tracking the amount of you know your steps and maybe your heart rate and it you know we're talking about bytes of data per second so Bluetooth energy is is a protocol that was really geared towards these types of applications uh and IOS and Android adopted Bluetooth energy approximately 2011 2012 and you know now there's many products out there that are using this technology fantastic I appreciate you giving that a quick overview so when we're talking about a ble product is so that's just a a an iot product that uses ble technology is that correct that's correct yes okay fantastic and what are when when we're talking about the development of ble products I mean I'm sure there are tons of different angles you could take this to answer this question but what are some of the biggest challenges companies developers you know really face when it comes to deploying ble products and I want to kind of focus on that here for a second if you kind of pick some of the the bigger challenges that are worth noting for sure yeah I think um you know as I mentioned I think the software is fairly complex so when building a product there's usually kind of two main pieces of software needed uh there's the embedded software which is running on the device such as you know Nordic semiconductors or silicon Labs device and then there's the mobile application um now there's other types of Bluetooth products as well that you know are involved mesh technology or kind of other broader use cases but but you know we're just going to focus on kind of these these more basic use cases where you have a device talking to a mobile application so you need an embedded software developer that's going to write the code that runs on the device and a mobile software developer that's going to write the you know write your mobile app um you know as I mentioned there's going to be complexity in understanding the Bluetooth standard and working with the the sdks and apis that that use the Bluetooth little energy protocol um I think another area where people run into a lot of problems are real is really on the test side so uh today if you want to build a Bluetooth product that talks to an iOS device and an Android device there's a lot of really nuanced behavior that that the phones will do and um common issues that we see in our Consulting work is uh people build a product and maybe it's working 90 of the time but then they'll have this you know 10 percent of the time five percent of the time where either their customers uh if their products in the market or or maybe just in their test if they haven't released their product there's they see things like random disconnects or um pairing fails ten percent of the time um or um uh you know another case is where um uh similar to what I said you know the the battery consumption is not necessarily what they expect it to be even though right uh you know Bluetooth energy is supposed to be a low power standard so I I think you know getting something up and running might be easy but then there's a lot of these like nuanced details which is really going to make or break your product I mean if it's failing for 10 of the time uh that's that's not a very good user experience no not at all yeah it's um you know one of the topics we or at least areas we try to cover in a lot of these conversations is around the challenges that different Technologies or different processes or different deployments see um when it comes to use cases and different applications is there a a typical type of product or kind of vertical that you see ble kind of pose more of a challenge in uh using the technology to implement those kinds of products or is it kind of just across the board with when it comes to the building any type of ble product I'd say a lot of these issues are are really across the board um and uh I'll give you another example of a common issue that I see um so so a lot of applications sometimes people don't think about security um you know for medical devices sure uh you know security is usually on the Forefront of people's minds but let's say let's say You're Building something that's just like a simple consumer Gadget that has no Financial applications or medical implications if um you know if it's say it's unsecure well what I think a lot of people don't realize is that um security can be as simple as preventing an unwanted user from connecting your to your device even if there's nothing malicious that they can really do um so so what can happen is let's say you have a device you have nothing that's protecting um sort of let's call them unauthorized users from connecting to it well I can just take my phone and download an off-the-shelf application which enables me to just connect to any Bluetooth energy device and I can just connect to some device that someone has while that user might take out their phone you know the actual user and the owner of this product might be trying to use the app and connect to their device and to them they're not going to be able to connect to it because a um you know a hacker or you know this could just literally literally just be a kid who's downloaded app has connected to their device now to to the actual user of this product they're going to think the that their products broken because they're just not able to connect to it they're not going to realize that there's a security failure here or that something malicious happening to them they're just seeing I'm trying to connect to my device and it's not working uh I'm going to return my product because it's not working so so there's little things like that which are some of the details that if if you're not thinking these things through when you're building your product they can actually cause you know really bad user experiences and failures out in the field yeah I was going to ask you about user experience because a lot of times in conversations I've had with other guests we talk about the um kind of building from the user and the user experience backwards because of how valuable that experience is in delivering and realizing the value of a product or solution in the iot space so talk me talk to me about the challenges that the user experience sometimes poses when it comes to building and deploying Bluetooth products yeah for sure and I think that's that's a great approach uh to looking at it um is to look backwards and we always encourage that when working with um you know our platform customers as well as our Consulting customers I I always want people to Envision how how do you how do you expect the user user product and and probably the the one word that comes to mind is um I think great user experiences are usually seamless uh CMOS and um intuitive uh typically with Bluetooth products that will involve opening up an app on your phone and maybe either turning on your device if it has an on switch or pressing a button on your device to put it into uh you know a pairing or connection mode and then everything just kind of works naturally from that point on um with Bluetooth energy you don't even need to go into your Bluetooth menu to um to pair which uh you know with IOS and Android devices typically with with audio applications you do need to go through uh your phone settings connect to device pair but with Bluetooth energy actually all that can be managed uh completely within the application so um you know what what I like to say is um it should be seamless which might mean if there's a button that the user needs to press on their device you can actually have your app instruct the user you can show a picture of your device and uh you know an arrow pointing to the button say press this button to put your your device into pairing mode once the user puts into the pairing mode the application the mobile application can kind of naturally either walk the user through that that setup process or or automatically do it yeah it's um it's something that I feel like is as silly as it sounds it's often overlooked it shouldn't be it seems like a very common um area that maybe the attention is not as paid as much as it should be but it's something that definitely contributes high level or across the board I would say to the success of any product regardless of the technology that's involved inside it absolutely um so one of the last questions I have here for you before I let you go is so we've talked about kind of the challenges we talked about what ble products are and how they kind of work how do you what is your advice or kind of what are the steps that you recommend companies take when it comes to building a high quality Bluetooth product with a great user experience like how can people do that yeah uh you know we we have a document which is called the the Bluetooth energy developers checklist and um within this document which is available for download from our website swarlink.com uh you know for free uh
fill out a form and download it we give you a list of um let's call them things that you should think about uh at every stage your development when you're when you're first kind of architecting your product during software development and during your testing phase and these are they're not necessarily things that are must Do's but they're things that you have to at least think about uh some of the things on the checklist are optimizing for for throughput uh optimizing for power consumption you should think about what is your what is your battery life that you expect on your product well you should make sure that you're actually doing the right things to get to make sure that you get the battery life that you want we talked about security and preventing unauthorized connections that I mentioned um here's another one over there are firmware updates we believe that every single Bluetooth energy device should Support over the air firmware updates and the reason for that is because you just never know what's going to happen in the future you never know if there's going to be bugs found on your application you never know if there's gonna be bugs in the Bluetooth stack which is is code that you're not even writing you want to be able to update your product in the field uh as well as you know there's also security updates that you might want to um patch in the future so we think that every product should really Support over the or firmware updates so um you know I always tell developers that they should look through and think through all these different uh items on our checklist and once you've done that then you've got to look at what are my options well uh you know as I said you can use the sdks directly from developer from the the Semiconductor Company that you're working with and they support these features but that that doesn't mean that you get these features by default you still need to write your application code you still need to test them out you still need to verify that it works with iOS works with Android that it works reliably um you know another option that I think some people look at if they're trying to do this more easily is they look at certain uh there's prototyping platforms out there I mean Arduino is one that a lot of people are familiar with and and you know Arduino supports a lot of these features but uh it's one it's not as easy to use as you might think it is uh Arduino still requires you to kind of understand a lot of um a lot of the details of Bluetooth standard right and then arduinos are are great for prototyping but they're not necessarily going to be useful when you are ready to mass produce a product and build ten thousand twenty thousand a hundred thousand units of of your product uh so you really want to think through what what is a software Solution that's going to work for you during development prototyping testing and mass production and uh you know we built something that uh our middleware platform is something that I feel that that addresses uh Bluetooth software development during all these phases fantastic yeah this is um I think that the checklist that you mentioned that you have is a very key thing to take away from this conversation that there is a road map on how to do this well it's been proven out it's been you know done by many different companies and developers to bring a um Bailey product to Market and without you know with avoiding the kind of common pitfalls and kind of overcoming those challenges that we were speaking about earlier in our conversation I think it's something that that uh you know every every company can benefit from kind of building themselves and and uh or sorry utilizing but also in the space that they play in having kind of a checklist of how to do things the right way for their customers their developers the people that are interacting with their tools um to or platforms to to kind of achieve success faster or give them a chance to achieve success success faster and I think what you guys have done is is super interesting and um I think our audience can get a ton of value out of kind of looking into that and better understanding how they can do this the right way yeah absolutely last thing I want to ask you or kind of mention is is for audience who wants to learn more about kind of what you all do the space you're in uh follow up with any questions those kinds of things what's the best way they kind of reach out and um and touch base yeah for sure you can find information on our platform at swallowlink.com we also have uh uh you can demon run a demo of our platform yourself if you have one of these development kits from from Nordic semiconductors or silicon Labs uh that's all documented on our website swallowlink.com docs uh feel free to reach out to me you can find me on LinkedIn or email me Sandeep swirlink.com I'm happy to answer any
questions that anyone might have about this fantastic well Stadium thank you so much for taking the time um a great conversation around topic that um you know I'd love us to be able to cover more so I'm looking forward to working together more closely and hopefully getting more content out to our audience around Bluetooth Bluetooth energy bringing these products to Market how to do it the right way so so really appreciate your time and I look forward to talking again soon for sure thanks for having me Ryan all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the iot for all podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the Thumbs Up Button subscribe to our Channel and be sure to hit the Bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
2023-01-03 18:28
