MATLAB: How to communicate with a BLE device in Simulink

simulink

I would like to communicate with a BLE (Bluetooth low energy) device in Simulink. However, I found no BLE blocks in the Simulink library. Is this supported?

Best Answer

There is currently no Simulink block that can directly read from a BLE device using the host PC interface. An enhancement request to add BLE Read/Write blocks to Simulink has been submitted to our development team.
As a workaround, you can add a MATLAB Function Block in your model that leverages the ble() function from MATLAB, which has been available since R2019b:
https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2019b/matlab/ref/ble.html
The code inside the MATLAB Function Block would be along the lines of:
function y = fcn()    
    persistent b;    %automatically initialized to []

    persistent hr;   %automatically initialized to []
      %%extrinsic declarations
      coder.extrinsic('ble');
      coder.extrinsic('characteristic');
      coder.extrinsic('read');
      if(isempty(b))
          b = ble("UA E39 MODULE");
          hr = characteristic(b, "heart rate", "heart rate measurement");
      end
      %%initialize output
      y = zeros(...)
      %%read data from BLE device
      data = read(hr);
      %%post-process the data
      y = ...
  end
Note that the 'ble'-related functions do not support code generation and therefore need to be declared as extrinsic.
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