Any preliminary information available for Digi XBee3™ Cellular LTE-M/NB-IoT 'Bluetooth Low Energy Ready' ?

Question

The Digi XBee3™ Cellular LTE-M/NB-IoT product summary web page indicates "Bluetooth Low Energy Ready". What documentation is available for BLE portion of this module? If none, is there an estimated timeline for documentation ?

Answer 1

The 11410 firmware which was released just a few days ago adds the capability to use BLE to configure the device through an encrypted API service, as well as send/receive user data between API interfaces and/or MicroPython. More features like MicroPython programmability will be coming in future firmware versions.

In order to update to 11410, you will need to install the 1140F "gating firmware" (which installs 11410 while reorganizing the product's flash memory).

It looks like the user guide isn't quite updated yet, but it should be very soon. Keep an eye out for that update!

Comments

Hi! Is there any documentation online about how to send/receive data via Bluetooth in Micropython? I could not find anything that would give me a hint on how this should work. The latest product notification says "Framework to send data to other applications via Bluetooth low energy" but I could not figure out how.

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BLE support from MicroPython is still on its way for a future release. Right now the only things you can do over BLE with an XBee3 device running BLE-enabled firmware is configure the XBee using AT command API frames, and send data to/from serial or MicroPython using the User Data Relay frame. (Basically, API frames over BLE.) The relay frame allows you to send arbitrary messages to a MicroPython app; we have not yet released support for things like performing GATT operations or creating connections via MicroPython.

Reference information for all this can be found here: https://www.digi.com/resources/documentation/Digidocs/90002258/#Containers/cont_BLE_reference.htm

The API frame service is described here: https://www.digi.com/resources/documentation/Digidocs/90002258/#Reference/r_BLE_behavior_services_xbee_api_BLE.htm (It looks like we forgot to include the 0x2D User Data Relay frame in the documented list of supported frames)