I'm working on an app using bluetooth LE technology. I am trying to build a bi-directional communication between two devices, and first thought Bluetooth LE was the perfect choice at first.
But then the more I learn about it the more disappointed I became, because it looks like not enough devices support the peripheral feature, even though this has been introduced a long time ago.
I know the central role is possible in most cases, but for my app to work, I need to make sure there are enough devices out there that support (and will support) the peripheral role as well.
But I'm really not sure what the situation is because I couldn't find any reputable source which has a list of devices that support the peripheral feature. And due to the fragmented nature of the ecosystem I have no idea if this is something hardware vendors are planning on dropping or if the coverage will increase.
Can anyone share some insights?
Edit: I have already read another answer suggested as a duplicate (Chipsets/Devices supporting Android 5 BLE peripheral mode) as well as almost everything I could find on Stackoverflow about this topic. But I have yet to come across a definitive list of what devices support this feature, and what the future of this feature is. It's extremely frustrating not knowing whether I should even rely on this API or not because while they say it depends on the hardware vendor, NO hardware vendors include this information in their device spec, which is why I asked this question.
A good rule of thumb seems to be that devices which have Bluetooth chips with version 4.1 or above have proper support for the peripheral role.
Otherwise all Bluetooth devices and their features are listed on https://www.bluetooth.org/tpg/listings.cfm. Note that you might have to search for the model number and not brand name, like LG-H790 instead of Nexus 5X. Then press >> DISPLAY ICS DETAILS >>.
But maybe you can use Bluetooth classic? Android - communicating between two devices
Related
So I'd like to use Wifi-Aware for a program outside the Android universe (let's assume Linux/OSX/Windows) and cannot find any info on this at all.
At first I thought it would suffice to use a Wifi-Aware certified product
running one of these OSes and then implement the Wifi-Specs, but when I tried to download the specifications, I was asked to login first (but with no option of creating an account).
Do I understand correctly that you have to be a paying member of the Wifi-Alliance to even get the specifications?
Furthermore, is my assumption that, with the specification, I would be able to implement a Wifi-Aware/NAN application on say, Windows/Linux correct? Or is the specification something that is meant for OS developers and an application would rely on support from OS (like Android provides) to support this? (This would then mean that it is in fact impossible to implement Wifi-Aware applications on Windows/Linux, since the OSes do not seem to support it)
Edit: There is a question on this, but it seems to have been asked from a user, not a programmer perspective, and is not going into much detail, so I do not consider this one to be a duplicate.
You need support for WiFi Aware at the hardware and the OS levels.
The wifi.org website mentions the following "certified Wi-Fi Aware devices":
Broadcom BCM4361 11ac STA Reference Design
Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265
Marvell 802.11ac Wave2 Wi-Fi Test Bed Evaluation Kit
Qualcomm® mobile Wi-Fi AC2 chipset
I guess that Intel card might be your best bet? Although the iwlwifi driver page mentions that:
While we advertise support for Wi-Fi Location* and Wi-Fi Aware* on
8260, we can't commmit on accurate results for those features. NAN
isn't considered stable yet and may or may not work depending on the
firmware version.
As for OS support, as far as I know that is currently limited to Android.
I am currently trying to develop a mobile application for both iOS and Android. It basically will be a game buzzer app, determining which of the players is granted a right to answer a specific questions.
The problem is that I struggle to determine which technology / framework I should use for that. Now, some details:
In this app there will be a "base" - it is the phone that gives
"start" signal for all the other players. Each buzzer pressed before this signal corresponds to a false start. Eventually, information
about which player is granted a right to answer or is penalized due
to false start should be displayed on the base device.
App is done for people who have no access to the internet. All the
communication should exists given ONLY mobile phones with no data
plan.
Max number of communicating devices is 9 (1 base and 8 players)
I investigated a lot of resources and this is what I discovered:
Regular WLAN with TCP sockets and etc won't help, since it assumes that all devices are connected to same wireless access point - it violates my requirements.
Regular bluetooth won't help either. This would work across a specific platform, but making Android talk to iOS is impossible.
Situation with Wi-Fi direct is same as with regular bluetooth. Both platforms support this, but Apple's MultipeerConnectivity framework works only with iOS devices.
Now the last option I am left with is BLE. Both platforms support this and are able to intercommunicate (acting both as central or peripheral devices). However, due to my requirements for an app, I assume that base device should act as peripheral, and according to (sometimes conflicting) articles on Internet, one can't connect several central devices to single peripheral.
Now, my questions:
I still assume I might have done some mistakes in the bullet points above, so please, correct me if I am somewhere wrong.
Now when I am left only with BLE option, are there any possible solutions to the above issue? Maybe it is possible to use all devices as centrals (?). I recently saw this example, where everything works cool. Sorry in advance, if I said something stupid.
Of course, there is a counterexample - FireChat, which employs OpenGarden's MeshKit. But the framework is not available. I tried communicating OpenGarden people, but no response. Does anyone know if it is planned to go opensource soon, or maybe there exists any analog of this?
Try the Hype SDK by Hype Labs. It's a multi-transport, multi-hop mesh SDK. It supports interoperable Bluetooth Low Energy (and other transports as well). The SDK is currently in private beta but will be made available upon approval of the subscription.
I need some guidance on a project im currently working on - I work on a project to communicate with a BLE device s.t. the device is connected to an android phone and transmits some data once in a while. I saw some lectures on BLE communication with android devices and read some information on the android 4.3 bluetooth API but there are some things I didnt got yet
In case I want my app to be compitable backward (up to 2.3) is that possible? did they (Google) include the new features on the support package?
Where can I find some good code example of using the android as a client?
When communicating with an android device I need the charestirestic of the bluetooth device to have UUID, do I generate some UUID's on the run? (and in that case how) or do I hard-code them on the app? (since on that case two people using this app and close to each other basically can read each other's signal, don't they?)
In case I want my app to be compitable backward (up to 2.3) is that possible? did they (google) include the new features on the support package?
Bluetooth low energy needs to be supported by the HW and there are only a handful of devices with the necessary Bluetooth radio running an older version of Android. For sure no device running 2.3 will be able to run BLE.
Where can I find some good code example of using the android as a client?
The examples provided on developer.android.com is actually quite good
When communicating with an android device I need the charestirestic of the bluetooth device to have UUID, do I generate some UUID's on the run?
Bluetooth Special Interest Group has already created a bunch of assigned numbers. These have a well defined meaning across all BLE devices and services. Then businesses can apply for a range of UUID's that they can use to defined there own services.
On top of that there are some free ranges where everyone can define and use UUID's. These will not be well defined across devices, meaning other applications will not understand the UUID's you've defined.
I have been searching for a while now and decided to post a question here to see if someone had already traveled down this specific road.
I am developing a bluetooth enabled device, using the Bluegiga BLE112 chip. They announce this chip to be easily used with iOS devices (and this was our main reason for choosing it)
The device will need to communicate with an App, that we need to be developed for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Due to this need, I've decided to use Rhomobile, as it seems to be the only one that supports developing BT apps for iOS without having to develop further plugins.
I only need to send small messages (like commands, small strings) and sometimes a bigger file to the device's internal memory.
On Rhomobile's BT documentation, they state that for iOS it is only possible to comunicate between iOS devices ( i'm thinking that they say this because of the MiFi limitations imposed by Apple, but that using Bluegigas chip are not a problem...)
My question is:
Since Bluegiga's documentation has examples of devices communicating with iOS using their chip, i should be able to develop using Rhomobile and not suffer from the limitation stated above. I wanted to be as sure as possible before making my company spend money ordering the chips and development board and what not..
Has anyone tried this, is my thinking missing something?
Thank you all for your time.
Daniel
Good Question, I think I can understand the reason for your confusion.
The main reason is many people/products/frameworks does not clearly mention if they are talking about Bluetooth Classic or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
These are both 2 different things and even thougfh they are called "Bluetooth" one cannot talk to the other.
(Some devices can be both Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy, which allows it to connect to either types)
Ok now comming to your Question :
THE bluegiga dongle is BLE
The Rhomobile is refering to the Bluetooth Classic version of the API.
On iOS the BLE APIs are open to applications, but Classic is limited on iOS , one way for Apps to use Classic Bluetooth on iOS is via the Gamekit APIs but that is possible only when talking with iOS devices, so it wont connect to another Android or Win device that is also Classic.
Needless to say with BLE APIs you cannot connect to calssic anyways.
The bluegiga examples are BLE examples, and apple also has good documentation and examples / samples on how to use BLE so yes it is easy to build a device and app using BLE on iOS.
There is nothing special abut any particular chip yo ucan use any BLE chip - there are many vendors today.
BUT Android (and I guess Windows as well) does not yet have BLE APIs for applications to use :( (Bit I think is is comming soon :))
So I hope this clears things up a bit.
In my App I need to connect a smartphone with an 4.0 low power Bluetooth-module. Then the module sends frequenly data to the phone.
Do you know some good tutorials for programming Bluetooth connection
with Android?
Can you give me some links where the basics of Bluetooth are
explained? (german if possible)
How can I test it? (I have to programm the Bluetooth device too
and it's not finished jet)
Google havn't understood that sometimes they have to actually create and DRIVE something themselves, not just piggybacking on open source stuff and marketing it as their own.
Unfortunately there are no standardised BT 4.0. Low Energy API's for Android yet. Maybe Google just decided to only go for NFC for Google Wallet or something and then let BLE die. (We really need BOTH!)
Broadcom tried to make an open source API but somehow (maybe Broadcom wanted money from them?) no phones included the ".so" file in their Android build so this API is useless.
TI and Motorola made another API for the RAZR series running on old Android 2.3.3 or something. This actually works but Motorola removed the documentation and source-code from their site.
HTC ONE X+ and newer HTC phones will support a new API "soon" with special HTC libraries according to HTC. (At least it seems they are doing something)
Samsung Galaxy S3 have some "secret" API's that some people can use for discovering devices, scanning services and characteristics (there is an app in google play "semilink Bluetooth Smart Scanner" which on the Galaxy S3 can do those things).
Google asked Broadcom to make a replacement for Bluez in Android 4.2. Unfortunately this release broke a lot of functionality and peripheral compatibility. Maybe because one or more of Wifi/GPS/Bluetooth Classic/Bluetooth Low Energy shares the same HW resources but the drivers doesn't handle that very well. Lot's of people got problems with the newest Android Bluetooth functionality.
So I would expect Broadcom to focus on fixing the mess and THEN with Google move on to add Bluetooth 4.0. Low Energy. Google have said "Low Energy is the next BIG thing we will integrate". At least 1 year too late.
Personally I had to buy an iPhone4S and iPad retina to get platforms which supports low energy. With those we could finish the BLE peripheral sw and get the protocols working. Now we are waiting for Google and Broadcom to clean up the mess. Hopefully with some backwards compatibility so all the old phones with BT4.0. capable chipsets will also open up to the wonderful world of coincell battery driven peripherals ;-) (got to dream).
In reality we must wait for HTC to release their APIs and for Google to choose/drive the standard API.
Windows Phone 8 was supposed to get BLE but it has been postponed for an update. (Lumia 920 is certified but without API's (AGAIN!!) we developers are helpless)
There are nice GATT API's for Windows 8 as well as for MAC "OS"x.
You really should invest in the TI BLE development kit which costs like $50-$100 for a dongle which can be used for BLE sniffing. It comes SOOO handy when you develop your BLE Peripheral SW.