Guide on Hubble Developer Blog

BLE Basics

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless protocol designed for low-power devices that need to transmit small amounts of data intermittently. Unlike classic Bluetooth (used for audio streaming and file transfers), BLE prioritizes battery life over throughput—making it ideal for sensors, trackers, and IoT devices that run for months or years on a coin cell. Understanding BLE fundamentals is essential for building reliable, battery-efficient connected devices.

This guide covers the core concepts you need to understand before building BLE devices.

Getting Started with Hubble Network

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bluetooth, but to space

BLE was designed for tiny power budgets and short hops between two devices in the same room. Hubble’s satellites pull those advertising packets out of the air from 600 km up.

Same SoC. No new radio, no new antenna, no new licensing. The work is a firmware integration.

If that sounds implausible: it sounded implausible to a lot of people, including the engineers who built it. The trick is on the receive side, where Hubble’s satellites use a phased-array antenna with over 100 elements working in unison to pull signal out of noise. Your device just transmits a slightly more deliberate BLE advertisement than usual.

How to Use BLE Coded PHY for Long-Range Communication in Noisy Environments

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your BLE link works perfectly on the bench. You ship 50 units to a customer’s warehouse. Half drop connection past aisle 3, and the rest cough up corrupted packets every time the forklift charger kicks on. You’re using the wrong PHY.

BLE 1M PHY, the long-standing default, falls apart somewhere between 30 and 50 meters indoors, and it gets worse fast when Wi-Fi APs, microwaves, and Zigbee gateways are stomping on the same 2.4 GHz band. Coded PHY, added in Bluetooth 5.0, buys you roughly 12 dB of extra link budget and about 4x the range, with the same silicon you already have. Here’s how to turn it on, configure it correctly in Zephyr, and prove it works under realistic noise. We’ll use a Nordic nRF52840 + Zephyr 3.x setup as the reference.

What Is a BLE Gateway and When Does Your IoT Deployment Need One

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve got 200 BLE sensors on rental equipment scattered across job sites in 14 states. Every one of them is collecting data right now: temperature, vibration, runtime hours. Data that’s going absolutely nowhere.

It’s stuck. BLE sensors can whisper about 100 meters. They were never designed to reach the internet. So your sensors know things, but you don’t.

A BLE gateway fixes this. It’s the bridge that carries sensor data from that 100-meter whisper to your cloud dashboard. But your gateway architecture will determine whether your deployment scales to 5,000 assets or stalls at 50. Let’s walk through how to make that choice.

How Samsara's Asset Tag Delivers Cellular-Grade Tracking with Bluetooth

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The average construction company loses between 5% and 10% of its tool and equipment inventory every year. Not to catastrophic events, but to the mundane: a generator left at last week’s job site, a compressor that ended up on the wrong truck, a trailer parked in a yard nobody remembers. The typical response is to throw expensive hardware at the problem: cellular GPS trackers at $30+ per unit, each drawing enough power to need recharging every few weeks, each requiring a SIM card and a monthly subscription. Multiply that by 500 assets and you’ve built yourself an operational headache that costs more to manage than the losses it prevents.

How to Build a Bluetooth Tracker That Sends Sensor Data Without a Gateway

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most BLE asset trackers are only as useful as the gateway infrastructure behind them. Remove the gateways, and you’ve got an expensive beacon shouting into the void. That’s the dirty secret of industrial BLE deployments: the tracker costs $10, but the gateway network to actually hear it costs $50,000 across a port or construction site, plus ongoing maintenance, power, and backhaul. And when the assets move between facilities, your fixed infrastructure stays behind.