EFR Connect BLE Mobile App

What is EFR Connect BLE mobile app?

Silicon Labs EFR Connect is a generic BLE mobile app for testing and debugging Bluetooth® Low Energy applications. With EFR Connect, you can quickly troubleshoot your BLE embedded application code, Over-the-Air (OTA) firmware update, data throughput, and interoperability with Android and iOS mobiles, among the many other features. You can use the EFR Connect app with all Silicon Labs Bluetooth development kits, Systems on Chip (SoC), and modules.

Why download EFR Connect?

EFR Connect radically saves the time you will use for testing and debugging! With EFR Connect, you can quickly see what’s wrong with your code and how to fix and optimize it. EFR Connect is the first BLE mobile app allowing you to test data throughput and mobile interoperability with a single tap on the app.

How does it work?

Using EFR Connect BLE mobile app is easy. It runs on your mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet. It utilizes the Bluetooth adapter on the mobile to scan, connect and interact with nearby BLE hardware.

After connecting the EFR Connect app and BLE hardware (e.g., a dev kit), the Blinky test on the app shows a green light indicating when your setup is ready to go. The app includes simple demos to teach you how to get started with EFR Connect and all Silicon Labs development tools.

The Browser, Advertiser, and Logging features help you to find and fix bugs quickly and test throughput and mobile interoperability simply, with a tap of a button. With our Simplicity Studio’s Network Analyzer tool (free of charge), you can view the packet trace data and dive into the details.

Demos and Sample Apps

EFR Connect includes many demos to test sample apps in the Silicon Labs GSDK quickly. Here are demo examples:

- Blinky: ”Hello World” of BLE
- Throughput: Measure application data throughput
- Health Thermometer: Receive data from the temperature sensor on-board sensor Silicon Labs kits.
- Connected Lighting DMP: Leverage the dynamic multi-protocol (DMP) sample apps to control a DMP light node from a mobile and protocol-specific switch node (Zigbee, proprietary).
- Range Test: Visualize the RSSI and other RF performance data on the mobile phone while running the Range Test sample application on a pair of Silicon Labs radio boards.

Development Features

EFR Connect helps developers create and troubleshoot Bluetooth applications running on Silicon Labs’ BLE hardware. Here’s a rundown of some example functionalities.

Bluetooth Browser - A powerful tool to explore the BLE devices around you.
- Scan and sort results with a rich data set
- Advanced filtering to identify the types of devices you want to find
- Multiple connections
- Bluetooth 5 advertising extensions
- Rename services and characteristics with 128-bit UUIDs (mappings dictionary)
- Over-the-air (OTA) device firmware upgrade (DFU) in reliable and fast modes
- All GATT operations

Bluetooth Advertiser – Create and enable multiple parallel advertisement sets:
- Legacy and extended advertising
- Configurable advertisement interval, TX Power, primary/secondary PHYs
- Support for multiple AD types

Bluetooth GATT Configurator – Create and manipulate multiple GATT databases
- Add services, characteristics and descriptors
- Operate the local GATT from the browser when connected to a device
- Import/export GATT database between the mobile device and Simplicity Studio GATT Configurator

Bluetooth Interoperability Test – Verify interoperability between the BLE hardware
and your mobile device
- Runs a sequence of BLE operations to verify interoperability
- Export results log

EFR Connect Release Notes: https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/release-notes/efr-connect-release-notes.pdf

Learn more about EFR Connect BLE mobile app: https://www.silabs.com/developers/efr-connect-mobile-app