Smart locks and smart sensors have become more and more trendy. Developers can spend a huge amount of time creating and connecting these popular Internet of Things (IoT) products to the cloud via gateways using wireless technologies such as Bluetooth® low energy(LE).

Choosing an easy-to-use cloud service that offers powerful functions, steadiness and multiple cloud-security features can also be a challenge, so RF-star and TI worked with Alibaba to provide support for the Ali Cloud Link IoT platform on RF-star Bluetooth low energy CC2640R2F wireless module.

RF-star provides a sample application for the CC2640R2F module software development kit (SDK) to support Ali Cloud Link. Through this sample application, you can receive the specific Alibaba profile, which contains a range of security features, over-the-air (OTA) support and good performance for compatibility with iOS and Android platforms. For example, you can use the secure hash algorithm (SHA) 256 security feature and the CC2640R2F wireless module’s true random number generator (TRNG) to generate keys for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, which is included in the CC2640R2F device’s hardware encryption engine. This ensures that every communication session gets a different key to improve the security performance for data transmission. With a few simple application programming interfaces (APIs), you can build up a secure Bluetooth low energy product.

Figure 1: SDK software architecture for the CC2640R2F wireless module

The 2.4GHz  CC2640R2F wireless module supports Bluetooth 4.2 and Bluetooth 5 ultra-low-power applications for IoT applications. The device has extremely low active radio frequency (RF), MCU power and low-power-consumption modes, thus enabling longer battery life. It includes a 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M3 core as well as many peripheral functions in which there is a unique ultra-low-power sensor controller. The sensor controller is suited for connecting external sensors, and automatically collecting analog and digital data when the rest of the system is in sleep mode.

The solution is suitable for many IoT applications and is already being used in multiple popular IoT applications such as smart locks and wearable devices.

The Ali Cloud Link IoT platform is an overall IoT solution for home, health care and consumer electronics. Ali Cloud Link offers multiple protections, guarantees cloud security for devices and supports the persistent connection of hundreds of millions of devices and the concurrency of millions of messages. The Ali Cloud Link IoT platform features functions like device registration management, account authorization, user management and data statistics, enabling devices to access the IoT and obtain device and user characteristics. Through abundant solutions from third-party partners, the Ali Cloud Link IoT platform can provide differentiating functions and value-added services and help you easily realize customized functions.

Figure 2: The Ali Cloud Link IoT platform' send-to-end Bluetooth solution ( Source: Alibaba )

Figure 3: The main function of Bluetooth devices