Bob Delbridge posted:SantaFeFan posted:Possibly a 3rd party modification could be incorporated to the train for audio? \
The Bluetooth radio in these products as shipped is, BLE, Bluetooth Low Energy. This version of Bluetooth is low bandwidth, and is unable to transfer data fast enough to support an audio stream.
Jon,
I have 3 of the BLueRail BLE boards installed and all have sound (coming out of my IPad). I also have 1 connected to a Gems 2" Bluetooth speaker/circuit board installed in a Bachmann E7, another Gems unit is being used outside an engine waiting to be installed inside one of the other engines (Weaver RS3 and Bachmann semi-scale 4-6-2).
While the sounds are fairly simple and generic and volume is low from the IPad speaker, using the Gems unit really improves the sound. I have no problem with transferring data.
I really don't know the inner workings of any of this except I know it works.
I'm using a 9.6v 2000Mah battery pack to power these engines, no wiring to the track.
I don't have any real knowledge of how the blueRail set up works for certain, but I would expect that no audio is being transmitted over the bluetooth connection. Instead i would expect that the audio is generated within the app and simply played through the device's speakers.
As for the BLE spec, one could theoretically transmit audio over it, but doing so would require a dedicated BLE radio and a discrete microprocessor that is fast enough to decode a live stream of data. Implementing such hardware would be orders of magnitude more expensive than the BLE+microcontroller on one module that is used in LC/+ products, and even if done would be very difficult to program in a useful fashion. In the "easy" to do way it would limit pairing to control only one engine so as not to interrupt the audio stream when polling other engines. It could be done, but at this time the cost is prohibitive, and in my opinion anyway, would ruin the simplicity and elegance of the LC/+ BLE system.
JGL
P.S. Jon, any tentative timeline on an app to allow the Universal remote to control first generation LC engines?
