Open the Door to a “Connected Home” with CSR WiFi-based Bluegiga modules

Wi-Fi availability in consumer homes continues to grow rapidly (73% in the UK and 61% in the US, according to Strategy Analytics in April 2012). This broad access to Wi-Fi provides an Internet portal for a range of previously isolated consumer devices and enables consumer product developers to provide services to support existing devices and to create new product categories.

Wi-Fi has rapidly become the delivery method of choice for Internet-enabled services for applications in home automation, and complements the direct remote control provided by Bluetooth low energy devices. Wi-Fi enables devices to integrate directly with cloud services. Concepts for how these capabilities will be used in the future include areas such as monitoring and control of home appliances and “white goods”, preventative maintenance, energy management, and the ability to deliver supplies for consumer products as part of a service. Wi-Fi also forms a valuable part of consumer health management services enabling low cost platforms to collect and coordinate data from patients and home devices.

Innovation in emerging markets for consumer Wi-Fi products has been limited by the upfront product development complexity and cost, said Anthony Murray, Business Group SVP, CSR. As a result of our collaboration with Bluegiga, these new Wi-Fi modules provide a simple method whereby developers can enrich the consumer experience with the powerful connectivity provided by CSR Wi-Fi.

These new modules give our OEM customers easy-to-integrate solutions for delivering market-leading features, said Mikko Savolainen, Bluegiga’s VP of Product Management. And with excellent radio performance, industrial specifications, long life-time and regulatory qualifications, they also enable reduced R&D risk, cost and time-to-market.

The new CSR-powered Bluegiga modules come with an embedded implementation of 802.11 MAC and TCP/IP software and include a powerful, easy-to-use Bluegiga command interface to manage connectivity functions, such as Access Point discovery, associations and connection establishment – keeping Wi-Fi operations simple and transparent for the end user. In order to simplify and speed up development, the Bluegiga modules also come with a range of libraries for various host systems in source code format.