Gateway Shield

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The bluz gateway shield is one of the special features of bluz. By pairing the shield with a Particle Photon or Electron (not provided), you can give bluz access to the cloud at all times using WiFi or cellular as the back-end connection. It is basically a bridge from Bluetooth LE to the internet. This allows you to place the most power-hungry portion of your deployment in a central location with a constant power source, then place many battery powered bluz boards wherever you may need.

The gateway shield works by using an nrf51822 in central mode, allowing up to 8 bluz boards to connect at once. The shield then uses SPI to talk to the provided Photon/Electron, which opens the TCP sockets to the Particle cloud.

The gateway shield can be programmed just like bluz, the nrf51822 central will show up as a separate device class in your Particle account. Breakout pins allow you to add sensors or other devices.

Guide

Bluz DK

The following are the major components on the gateway shield along with their purpose: