Like all communication technologies, Bluetooth is a better fit for some applications than others. If you're considering using Bluetooth, here’s an outline of the primary factors that determine the effective range of Bluetooth communications, plus some ways to improve it with networking. This article is now updated with the addition of Bluetooth 5 performance.

The world needs educated children to help solve major challenges. But what does a well-rounded, effective education look like? There is scientific evidence to suggest that the key developmental benefit of play is an important part of a holistic education.

It is hard to think of a profession facing a more trying set of circumstances than farming. Climate change has brought higher temperatures and lower winter rainfall. Soil erosion, a loss of biodiversity, as well as myriad pests and diseases add to the farmer’s burden.

The natural resources around us represent the basis for all human activity on Earth. We use these resources to produce food, clean drinking water, clothes, electrical energy, and everything else we need to survive. But these resources are limited.

The global agricultural and farming industry is facing a perfect storm. Earlier this month, the world population hit eight billion for the first time, in the two weeks since it has grown another 1.5 million. That is a lot of extra mouths to feed when there are already 690 million people going hungry, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

IoT Hype & Reality’ was the title of a 2019 presentation I made at a Global Semiconductor Alliance event just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. At that time, I recall some tech journalists were still wondering out loud if the IoT would ever happen, and I was arguing that it was already well underway.

Wireless connectivity with embedded machine learning (ML) opens up a whole world of opportunity. Connected devices that can directly process the information they gather on-device can be used to make the planet greener, cleaner, and a better place to live.

While we live in an increasingly tech-focused world, we still face many of the same dangers and threats to our personal safety that we did centuries ago. How can we turn our technology to help mitigate those dangers?

For the length of human history, technology has played an important role in preventing theft. Before car keys, Henry Ford had to chain his car to a lamppost to avoid anyone with the strength to turn a physical crank from stealing it. Anti-theft technology has moved on significantly since Ford’s day, but so too have the criminals, and it’s not just cars they have in their sights.

Increasing the range of a wireless product is an advantage for virtually every application. Consider, say, a large warehouse with a Bluetooth mesh network to track the location of valuable items. If each device in the network can communicate over longer distances, fewer devices are needed to cover the warehouse volume.