How does bluetooth actually work?
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It’s just a chip radio/receiver with a different band range than your actual cellular signal or other things. If you want more than that, you’ll need someone that actual knows more about the subject than me ( a rando just scrolling through)
Well that’s a really broad question and I would first ask a question in response: what exactly do you mean by Bluetooth actually working?
A very broad explanation would simply be that it is like a fancy personal radio. It works off the same technology as the radio waves that you pick up in your car. The same radio waves that engineers started messing with over a hundred years ago, just now we can make them really specific and not interfere with all the other waves around.
So in essence, rather than a big radio tower blasting waves for any random person with a radio to hear, Bluetooth is just a mini tower/transmitter so you can do whatever you specifically want with that wave. This could be connecting your own music, using that signal to control something, whatever.
It is a local wireless connection between devices managed by a protocol named Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a standardized protocol for sending and receiving data via a 2.4GHz wireless link. It’s a secure protocol, and it’s perfect for short-range, low-power, low-cost, wireless transmissions between electronic devices.
Eli5 It is a way of talking between two gadgets
Bluetooth works very much like your WiFi, by sending data wirelessly over a 2.4Ghz frequency, but there are 3 key differences:
* Bluetooth is designed to have low power consumption, and that’s mainly the reason why its effective range and transfer speeds are both lower than with WiFi
* WiFi will today also operate on a 5 Ghz frequency, which typically means more data can be crammed in during transfer, but a worse range than 2.4 Ghz due to attenuation (loss of signal over a distance)
* Different protocols. A protocol decides how two devices are expected to communicate and tends to be designed for specific purposes. Since Bluetooth serves a different purpose to WiFi, it talks to devices and sets expectations in a different manner
There are different ways Bluetooth devices talk to each other (sometimes referred to as handshakes), but it looks something like this:
1. One device broadcasts a signal to discover other Bluetooth devices. Other devices may reply with their identifying information.
2. Form a connection between devices.
3. Connectivity is formed, and now devices can either talk, enter a low-power idling mode, or a few other modes.
Bluetooth uses a tiny radio for things to talk to each other. To be called “bluetooth”, the radio has to use a certain channel, amount of power, and follow rules about how to format messages so that they can be understood.
For example, earphones broadcast a message that says “Hello everybody, my name’s FC Buds and I’m earphones; I speak stereo, and my turn-ones are volume control, pausing, and skipping. Anyone interested in a little 1-on-1?” Then another thing, like a car or computer listening for Bluetooth devices recognizes the request to pair-up and responds with “Hey, Buds! I’m FC Laptop, and I speak stereo too! I’d love to chat. Let’s exchange digits!” The two then swap messages directly by swapping encoded messages like “Gimme some sound, baby!” and “Have you heard this one?”
It works on the same basis as cell phones, wifi, and anything digital radio.
It emits at a very small power, so it consumes not much electricity and has a pretty limited range.
Software is built on top of that, and this software allows for identification, pairing and so on.
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Bluetooth is a standard for mobile, short range, wireless networks. It establishes devices such as your phone to operate and manage the network and devices to provide services to this manager — things like headphones.
Because it is mobile, there is the possibility of interference with other wireless communication systems. To prevent this, the frequency the Bluetooth network will change within a limited ranged in a process called frequency hoping to find a frequency that has the lowest interference.
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