6 Things You Are Yet To Know About Bluetooth

It is no longer new that bluetooth was named after viking and it works by using slavery. It was invented by Ericsson back in 1994, It was inteneded to enable wireless headset and in no time, it expanded to a broad varieties of application including bluetooth headset, speakers, games controller, and much more.

Given the importance of bluetooth and its charming usefulness in applications, here are the 6 interesting things you are yet to know about bluetooth

6 Things You Are Yet To Know About Bluetooth

1. Bluetooth is a Wireless Technology Standard

Wireless technology standards require both a hardware and software component. The hardware is required to be able to send the necessary signal via radio frequency, and the software determines what’s sent over that signal and how it’s interpreted.

2. Bluetooth is Named after a Viking

Jim Kardach had been reading “The Long Ships”, by Frans G. Bengtsson, which is set in the Viking Age and includes Harald “Blåtand” Gormsson, King of Denmark and Norway.

The Anglicised version of Harald “Blåtand” is Harald Bluetooth. He’s known for uniting dissonant Viking tribes into the Kingdom of Denmark.

The Bluetooth logo is also a combination of the runes for Harald Bluetooth’s initials, H.B.

3. Bluetooth Uses Slavery

When Bluetooth devices connect to each other (for example, your phone and your wireless speaker), it’s known as a master-slave relationship. One of the devices is the master and the other devices are slaves. The master transmits information to the slave and the slave listens for information from the master. 

A master can have up to 7 slaves, which is more reason your computer can connect to multiple devices.

4. Bluetooth is Better than Wi-Fi (Sometimes)

Wi-Fi is also a wireless technology standard, but Bluetooth and Wi-Fi serve two separate purposes. Wi-Fi (which is the brand name for the IEEE.802.11 standard) was meant to replace high-speed cables, so it takes some setting up but supports high bandwidth.

On the other hand, Bluetooth was meant for portable equipment and related applications. It’s great when you need to connect two devices with minimal configuration (often just pressing a button)

5. Bluetooth is Great for the Internet of Things

In the Industrial Internet of Things, machines often need to send short bursts of data in extremely noisy environments. With potentially hundreds of sensors and devices sending data, Wi-Fi poses too much hassle to setup.

A drawback of Bluetooth is lower bandwidth, but for many industrial applications this higher bandwidth simply isn’t needed.

6.  We’re on Bluetooth Version 5

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group officially adopted Bluetooth 5 as the latest version of Bluetooth back in December 2016.

“With Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth continues to revolutionize how people experience the IoT. Bluetooth continues to embrace technological advancements and push the unlimited potential of the IoT.”

—Bluetooth 5 Now Available

Bluetooth 5 is backwards-compatible with previous versions of Bluetooth, but new hardware is required to take advantage of the new benefits listed above. So it might be awhile until we see all the benefits that Bluetooth 5 has to offer, but it’s an exciting development as the Internet of Things continue to gain traction! 

POST CREDIT: Calum McClelland