How can I play bluetooth chess with my iPhone and my friend's Android device? Api? (Probably duplicate of other questions)
ZeroConf a.k.a. Bonjour is a fine way to discover other devices providing services, and it's limited to the local network. One of its best features is that it doesn't require any prior knowledge or setup -- it's mission is service discovery.
Why not just use a web service? It'd be easier than doing bluetooth discovery and pairing or wifi-server client stuff (trust me, at least on the latter). It's the easiest way to make everything relatively network (ie 3g/4g/wifi) independent. You just have a simple protocol your app follows, and you can play with all players everywhere, no discovery needed. Probably less battery drain than bluetooth too.
Bonjour is great for discovering stuff (ie other players) on the same network. The problem with bonjour is you usually need to be on the same wifi network (though not necessarily, but don't ask me how the hell this works, but it can be done apparently). You'd also in theory need to apply for an bonjour/mdns id, though this is pretty easy.
Here's a similar question.
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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'm trying to create a simple glassware using GDK which wirelessly receives
data from a laptop and uses the data to create some visual representation.
I'm wondering if the current Google Glass supports wifi direct or other kind of
wifi p2p connection, and it can be used for the idea.
Or is Bluetooth the only available option for this kind of applications?
Thank you so much in advance.
Since Glass is basically Android, anything that would work on Android should work with it. I think websockets will do what you want, and there are multiple implementations of that for Android and other platforms.
That said, be sure to remember that Glass is a relatively weak system with a short battery life, so maintaining long lasting communications could be costly. Use caution.
I've been reading up on how to transfer data between iOS devices over Bluetooth using GameKit. I'm not writing a game, per se, but do have a need to transfer a small amount of binary data between two devices. Between two iOS devices, this is easy enough. However, I was wondering if it is possible to transfer data between an iOS device and an Android device via the same mechanism.
Has anyone come across documentation/tutorial that would explain how to do this? Is it even technically possible? Or has Apple put in some sort of restriction that would prevent this?
The other option I discovered was Bonjour over Bluetooth. Would this be a more suitable option for this type of operation?
This question has been asked many times on this site and the definitive answer is: NO, you can't connect an Android phone to an iPhone over Bluetooth, and YES Apple has restrictions that prevent this.
Some possible alternatives:
Bonjour over WiFi, as you mentioned. However, I couldn't find a comprehensive tutorial for it.
Some internet based sync service, like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3. These usually have libraries for several platforms.
Direct TCP/IP communication over sockets. (How to write a small (socket) server in iOS)
Bluetooth Low Energy will be possible once the issues on the Android side are solved (Communicating between iOS and Android with Bluetooth LE)
Coolest alternative: use the Bump API. It has iOS and Android support and really easy to integrate. For small payloads this can be the most convenient solution.
Details on why you can't connect an arbitrary device to the iPhone. iOS allows only some bluetooth profiles to be used without the Made For iPhone (MFi) certification (HPF, A2DP, MAP...). The Serial Port Profile that you would require to implement the communication is bound to MFi membership. Membership to this program provides you to the MFi authentication module that has to be added to your hardware and takes care of authenticating the device towards the iPhone. Android phones don't have this module, so even though the physical connection may be possible to build up, the authentication step will fail. iPhone to iPhone communication is possible as both ends are able to authenticate themselves.
Maybe a bit delayed, but technologies have evolved since so there is certainly new info around which draws fresh light on the matter...
As iOS has yet to open up an API for WiFi Direct and Multipeer Connectivity is iOS only, I believe the best way to approach this is to use BLE, which is supported by both platforms (some better than others).
On iOS a device can act both as a BLE Central and BLE Peripheral at the same time, on Android the situation is more complex as not all devices support the BLE Peripheral state. Also the Android BLE stack is very unstable (to date).
If your use case is feature driven, I would suggest to look at Frameworks and Libraries that can achieve cross platform communication for you, without you needing to build it up from scratch.
For example: http://p2pkit.io or google nearby
Disclaimer: I work for Uepaa, developing p2pkit.io for Android and iOS.
You could use p2pkit, or the free solution it was based on: https://github.com/GitGarage. Doesn't work very well, and its a fixer-upper for sure, but its, well, free. Works for small amounts of data transfer right now.
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.
I have been searching if it is possible to develop a multiplayer game with socket programming on android platform over WiFi but I couldn't come across with a certain answer.
As I found out, there are ServerSocket and Socket classes in android sdk.
Can I use those to establish communication between 2 devices, over WiFi?
Also if I can make 2 devices connected somehow, how should I combine this with my game architecture?
Any advice will greatly appreciated. This is my first try on Android and Socket Programming. I heard about Skiller, WiFi Direct and some other stuffs but It has to be done with Sockets.
I am actually from Skiller and I will try to address at least some of your points:
Why do you need sockets for your game? It will help a lot if you will explain what exactly you are trying to achieve. Maybe there are other, less complicated, ways you can achieve the same thing. And integrating the communication solution with your game logic relies directly on that.
Directly connecting two devices, whether they are connected using wifi or 3G is a very complicated task. In order to do so you need to know the IPs of the devices and it varies from difficult (wifi - depends on the wifi you are connecting to) to almost impossible (3g - you can not see the ip of the device behind operators proxy) unless you implement couple different techniques or use intermediate servers to do that job. These solutions of course will cost you because of a hardware resources and the most important time resource. From my experience in that field I strongly recommend to use existing solutions if it matches your needs (and I am really trying to be objective ;))
Hope it helps to further investigate what you need for your game. If you want to check out Skiller SDK you are more than welcome to do that in our wiki: http://wiki.skiller-games.com/ or send an email to developers#skiller-games.com
Michael