Five Ways You Can Easily Kick-start Your Internet Of Things Development
RAD Studio offers IoT functionality and connectivity through a number of different protocols and components. You can integrate your IoT devices using Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy. You can talk to beacons and create a proximity fencing solution with BeaconFence. You can track and measure how often your apps are used using Embarcadero® AppAnalytics. You can easily connect your apps together via App Tethering over Bluetooh and Wifi. And finally you can connect to over 50 different IoT devices through ThingConnect and ThingPoint.
The RTL provides classes to implement Bluetooth support in your applications. When your application is running on a Bluetooth-enabled device, your application can use the Bluetooth capabilities of the device to connect to applications in remote devices and exchange data with those remote applications.
- Useful for applications with data streaming because it achieves greater throughput than Bluetooth LE technology.
- Data transfer rate : 2Mbps.
- High power consumption. Not suitable for certain devices such as wereables...
- Commonly used on cars, Handsfree profile...
- Technology based on standard Bluetooth profiles (SPP, DUN, PAN).
- The protocol is limited up to 7 slaves.
- Useful for applications that require periodic transfer of small amounts of data.
- Data transfer rate : < 100 kbps.
- Very low power consumption, ensured by a set of technical and radio techniques.
- Technology based on the Generic Attribute Profile.
- Supports a large number of slaves.
- Less connection time, no pairing process. Bluetooth LE just needs to connect to the device to read/write information.
BeaconFence is a developer proximity solution that delivers precise “GPS-Free” indoor/outdoor user location tracking and events with radial and rectangular zones for any physical location and layout. Visually draw the layout of the physical location and beacon placement to track location information down to inches. Create radial and rectangular zones and track intersections, enters, and exits with callback events.
A beacon is a Bluetooth Low Energy device including some information in its advertising data, specifically in the Manufacturer Specific Data described in "Bluetooth Specification Version 4.1, page 2023". This information allows any Bluetooth Low Energy device in the surrounding area to identify the device and calculate the distance to it without being paired or establishing a connection.
Embarcadero® AppAnalytics is the first analytics service for mobile, desktop, and wearables. Understand your end users, wherever they are, to deliver better apps and experiences. Track and measure how often apps are used, which platforms they are running, what features customers are using, find and log crashes and more. Understand user behavior by capturing anonymous usage stats from end users. AppAnalytics is an analytics and tracking service, hosted by Embarcadero Technologies and available for RAD Studio, C++Builder, Delphi, and Visual Studio. Understand users today in existing Windows VCL apps, FireMonkey mobile and desktop apps to deliver better solutions.
The RTL provides app tethering components, giving your applications the ability to interact with other applications running either on the same machine or on a remote machine.
Using app tethering, your applications can easily:
- Discover other applications that are using app tethering, running either on the same device as your application or on other connected devices.
- Run actions remotely. An application can publish actions using app tethering. Then other applications can remotely invoke any of these actions on the former application.
- Share data between applications. App tethering allows sharing of standard data types and streams.
The app tethering feature does not depend on a specific transport or protocol, and new transports and protocols can be implemented using the app tethering API. The RTL provides built-in support for IP and Classic Bluetooth connections. IP support includes connecting applications running on the same device.
If you are looking to wire up your home or office with smart technologies there are a number of devices that you can easily connect to and control from Delphi and C++Builder. These smart IoT devices that are part of ThingConnect. Bluetooth LE and Z-Wave are two technologies that are supported by ThingConnect. Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) or Smart Bluetooth provides a new environment for devices with small amount of data to transfer and lower power consumption. The Z-Wave protocol is an inter-operable, wireless, RF-based communications technology designed specifically for control, monitoring and status reading applications in residential and light commercial environments.
Components to connect with these ThingConnect devices can be downloaded from the GetIt Package Manager. Obviously you will need to have the device to be able to connect with it as well. When you install the package for each device from GetIt you will also get a demo app that you can load up and start testing with right away.
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