LightCal: Lightweight Optical-Pulse Bootstrap Calibration for Crystal-Free BLE Radios

Abstract

Crystal-free Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios remove the off-chip high-frequency crystal oscillator and can therefore reduce the cost, size, and integration complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes. However, they face a fundamental bootstrap problem: before a node can communicate over RF, it must first obtain a sufficiently accurate carrier-frequency reference. Existing approaches typically rely on RF beacons, already-connected nodes, or search-based channel acquisition, which can incur long startup latency and provide limited feedback when the initial carrier offset is large. This paper presents LightCal, a lightweight bootstrap calibration method that uses periodic optical pulses as an external timing reference for crystal-free BLE radios. LightCal is designed for highly resource-constrained platforms and requires only simple optical pulse reception. We implement LightCal on scum, a crystal-free IoT platform and use a commercial HTC Lighthouse V1 base station as an unmodified off-the-shelf optical pulse source. Experimental results show that pulse accumulation substantially improves the effective timing stability of Lighthouse sync pulses on SC$\hat{I}¼$M and enables practical BLE bootstrap calibration. In the current scum prototype, optical calibration brings the RF carrier into a bounded residual-error range, and the remaining offset is resolved by a narrow transmit-time fine sweep. The results demonstrate that optical pulse references can provide a practical pre-RF bootstrap calibration path for crystal-free and highly integrated IoT platforms.

6 pages,to be published in IEEE Globecom 2026