What is the LightBlue® — Bluetooth Low Energy application, how does it work?

According to the introduction of Punch Through Design, LightBlue® — Bluetooth Low Energy is a Tools app on the Android platform. There is currently a 1.6.3 version released on Mar 23, 2020, you can see the details below.

LightBlue® can connect you to all of your devices that use Bluetooth Low Energy (also known as Bluetooth Smart, or Bluetooth Light). With LightBlue®, you can scan, connect to and browse any nearby BLE device.

Full support of read, write, and notify is included to ease BLE firmware development efforts. You can also view the signal strength (RSSI) in real time to get an idea of how close you are to the BLE device, handy for finding lost Fitbits or other BLE devices!

The log feature allows you to keep track of all significant BLE events that occur while using the app (e.g., device discovery, connection, reading, writing).

Use LightBlue® to test your new BLE Heart Rate Monitor, temperature sensor, TI CC2540 Keyfob, Nordic uBlue, Panasonic PAN1720, etc. LightBlue® is also ideal for developers wanting to test the firmware of their own BLE peripherals.

Key Features:
- Scan for any BLE peripherals
- See basic device info (name, MAC address, RSSI) at a glance
- Browse characteristics and services
- Register for notifications
- Read characteristics
- Write to characteristics in hex or UTF-8 string format
- Thoroughly log BLE events and share them in plain text format

A note on location access: if your Android device is running Android M (6.0) and above, you'll need to grant the app fine location access in order for the OS to surface BLE scan results to the app. This is an Android SDK requirement—we do not use your location for anything, not even while the app is in the foreground.