Bluetooth Beacon Project Help

[BTZ93]

Hello everyone!

Let me start by saying that I am completely new here, so excuse me for my rookieness, but hopefully some kind souls here will be willing to help me!

I have a BLE Beacon project that I want to start, and potentially produce down the road, which has led me to beginning my study/learning process in this field for the first time in my entire life lol. I've always enjoyed electronics but have never studied how they work but will hopefully be able to learn from you all in the coming months and years!


Anyways, to get to the point...

What I'm looking to build/create is a really simple BLE beacon device with solid signal strength and reliable connectivity. The kicker is that I'm looking to make this in the smallest form factor possible.

Ideally I'm looking to create a footprint roughly the same as the "Tile Sticker" product, or potentially even smaller, but certainly no larger than a CR2032 battery. I'm also looking for it to be powered by a coin cell battery like a CR2032.


I know I may not be able to create a perfect product, and probably won't be close the first time, but I want to at least know I'm heading in the right direction, and if I can get pretty close to the final product on the first try then fantastic! I know nothing, but It doesn't seem that it could get much more simple than a BLE beacon. Maybe I'm delusional

SO MY QUESTIONS ARE THIS:

Am I being crazy? Is building such a beacon reasonable? Why or why not?

What would I need to do to build this on such a small footprint? What am I looking at as far as materials? PCB? Components? Programming?


I know that is a lot to read so thank you all for your time and potential help and answers on this topic!

- Connor

 

[danadak]

https://www.cypress.com/file/224231/download

PSoC™ 4 MCU with AIROC™ Bluetooth LE - Infineon Technologies

PSoC™ 4 Bluetooth® low energy integrates an Arm® Cortex® M0 MCU, touch sensing and mixed signal blocks with a Bluetooth® 4.2 compliant Bluetooth® low energy (Bluetooth® smart) radio

www.infineon.com

https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-PSoC_4_4200_BLE_Family_Datasheet_Programmable_System-on-Chip-DataSheet-v01_00-EN.pdf?fileId=8ac78c8c7d0d8da4017d0ee5f2a26ddd

To get started.


Regards, Dana.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

SO MY QUESTIONS ARE THIS:

Am I being crazy? Is building such a beacon reasonable? Why or why not?

Probably crazy - what's wrong with the many already available commercial products?.

If they aren't small enough?, then how do you expect to make something smaller than specialist professional designers and factories full of robots?.

 

[rjenkinsgb]

certainly no larger than a CR2032 battery. I'm also looking for it to be powered by a coin cell battery like a CR2032

A bit of a contradiction there?? Or do you mean totalling double the size of the battery?

Add enough space to contain the battery and allow changing it - and you have an Apple Airtag! Not much thicker than two 2032s stacked together.

At the most basic level, you can buy simple commercial BTLE item locator tags for less than the small quantity component cost - I have some bought from a local "Pound shop" that I got out of curiosity.