Develop Reference

Ble device is not pairing consistently to phone

I have a ble device that I need to regularly extract data from securely and constantly. So on startup I want to make sure to bond the device if it is not already. I have the Mac address of the device in this case.
public void startApp(){
remoteDevice = bluetoothManager.getAdapter().getRemoteDevice(MAC_AD);
if(remoteDevice.getBondState()!=12){
remoteDevice.createBond();
}
}
What ends up happening is that the bond state will alternate between unbonded and currently_bonding but not fully bond.
The strange thing is that sometimes it will work, but usually not, particularly on my google pixel. Bonding through the settings is also very inconsistent.
Is there any way to retry this or some kind of Bluetooth reset that should be done so that I can bond consistently?
I've tried calling createBond() in intervals;

I've often found that calling createBond() directly can have hit-and-miss results depending on the platform (both ends). Logically it should use the same mechanism internally, but I've tended to get better results by calling read on a simple characteristic which has bonded requirements.
It either successes - meaning your connection is bonded - and you can continue. Or it fails, which internally triggers the bonding, and then you can try again after a short delay, at which point it should now be bonded.

Android Beacon Library - extending BluetoothMedic for unconditional resets?

I have an Asus P00A tablet (Android 7.0, API24) on which the BLE stops after some hours. (This affects any BLE app, not just my app using Android Beacon Library). Apps start working again if I manually switch off BLE then switch it back on.
The BluetoothMedic auto-fix system did not work for my tablet. It runs every 15 minutes but does not find a fault and so does not "power cycle" the Bluetooth. However, I hacked the BluetoothMedic class, adding this:
public void cycleBluetooth(Context context) {...}
and attached this to a button. I find this will restore BLE functionality. So I wondered what would happen if I unconditionally reset the BLE every 15 minutes. I added:
public static final int ALWAYS_RESET = 4;
and then call medic.enablePeriodicTests(context, BluetoothMedic.ALWAYS_RESET);
and add code inside BluetoothTestJob.onStartJob() which then calls BluetoothMedic.cycleBluetooth(). This behaves as expected and so far my app has run perfectly for 18 hours.
I am interested in any advice, such as:
1 Are there any tests other than the two in BluetoothMedic that I can run to detect that my tablet's Bluetooth has stopped? (I am happy to experiment).
2 Any comments on the hack I describe above? Should it be OK to unconditionally reset the Bluetooth every 15 minutes?
3 If the Bluetooth is reset ("power cycled") then is the rest of the Android Bluetooth Library OK with this? That is, will it carry on with monitoring and ranging that has been previously set up, or does the application code need to set take any action to get things going again? Note that this would apply to resets by the existing enablePowerCycleOnFailures() code as well as my ALWAYS_RESET hack above. (Maybe there are some crashes that could happen if the power cycling came at the wrong time?).
4 Could I suggest adding a callback so the application can learn if the Bluetooth has been cycled? Perhaps as a parameter to enablePowerCycleOnFailures()
5 I understand that background activities can be stopped by the OS, especially with Android 8. Would this also affect the regular 15 minute tests set up by enablePeriodicTests()?

The Android Beacon LIbrary's BluetoothMedic, as currently built, relies on the operating system's error code returned by a scan failure (or an advertising failure) to decide if the bluetooth stack is in a bad state warranting a power cycle.
For scans, if the onScanFailed callback is called with an error code of SCAN_FAILED_APPLICATION_REGISTRATION_FAILED which has the value of 2, the module considers it worthy of a power cycle..
For advertisements, if the onStartFailed callback is called with an error code of ADVERTISE_FAILED_INTERNAL_ERROR which has a value of 4, the module considers it worth of a power cycle..
These values were determined via experimentation, witnessing that on some devices, once an error callback is called with these values, bluetooth on the device would not work again without turning it off and back on. You can see the discussion of this in this thread.
You may want to see if there are other error codes on the Asus P00A that indicate a problem worthy of cycling bluetooth. To do this, wait for a failure, and see if attempts to start scanning call the onScanFailed callback with a distinct error code. If such error codes exist, this would be a better solution than cycling power to bluetooth regularly, as cycling power to bluetooth does break BLE GATT connections and the operation of bluetooth classic functions like speakers. The Android Beacon Library itself recovers from these power cycles just fine, although it will obviously not detect beacons until bluetooth is back on.
Because the BluetoothMedic uses the Android Job Scheduler for periodic tests, it is not affected by background limitations on Android 8+.
If you are interested in augmenting these functions in the library, please feel free to open an issue in the Github repo, and issue a Pull Request if you have code to share.

Get BLE Scan without filter duplicate UUID

I'm writing an BLE application, where need to track if peripherals device is advertising or has stop.
I followed getting peripherals without duplications this and BLE Filtering behaviour of startLeScan() and I completely agree over here.
To make it feasible I kept timer which re-scan for peripherals after certain time (3 sec). But with new device available on market(with 5.0 update), some time re-scan take bit time to find peripherals.
Any suggestion or if anyone have achieved this?

Sounds like you're interested in scanning advertisements rather than connecting to devices. This is the "observer" role in Bluetooth Low Evergy, and corresponds to the "broadcaster" role more commonly known as a Beacon. (Bluetooth Core 4.1 Vol 1 Part A Section 6.2)
Typically you enable passive scanning, looking for ADV_IND packets broadcast by beacons. These may or may not contain a UUID. Alternatively, you can active scan by transmitting SCAN_REQ to which you may receive a SCAN_RSP. Many devices use different advertising content in ADV_IND and SCAN_RSP to increase the amount of information that can be broadcast - you could, for instance, fit a UUID128 into the ADV_IND followed by the Device Name in the SCAN_RSP. (Bluetooth Core 4.1 Vol 2 Part E Section 7.8.10)
Now you need to define "go away" - are you expecting the advertisements to stop or to fade away? You will get a Receive Signal Strength Indication "RSSI" with each advertisement (Bluetooth Core 4.1 Vol 2 Part E Section 7.7.65.2) - this is how iBeacon positioning works and there's plenty of support for beacon receivers in Android.
Alternatively you wait for N seconds for an advertisement that should be transmitted every T seconds where N>2T. The downside of the timed approach is that probably not receiving a beacon isn't the same as definitely receiving a weak beacon; to be sure you need N to be large and that impacts the latency between the broadcaster being switched off or moving out of range and your app detecting it.
One more thing - watch out that Advertising stops if something connects to a Peripheral (if you really are scanning for peripherals) another good reason to monitor RSSI.

First scenario: Bonded Devices
We know that if a bond is made, then most of the commercially available devices send directed advertisements in during re-connection. In situations such as this, according to BLE 4.0 specification, you cannot scan these devices on any BLE sniffer.
Second scenario: Connectable Devices
Peripheral devices are usually in this mode when they are initially in the reset phase. The central sends a connect initiator in response to an advertisement packet. This scenario offers you a lot of flexibility since you can play around with two predominant configuration options to alter connection time. These are: slavelatency on the peripheral and conninterval on the central. Now, I don't know how much effort it's going to take get it working on the Android platform, but if you use the Bluez BLE stack and a configurable peripheral such as a TI Sensor tag, then you can play around with these values.
Third scenario: Beacon devices
Since this is what your question revolves around, according to the BLE architecture, there are no parameters to play with. In this scenario, the central is just a dumb device left at the mercy of when a peripheral chooses to send it's beaconing signal.
Reference:
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Bluetooth-Communications-Sensing-Library/dp/1608075796/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_z
http://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Low-Energy-Developers-Handbook/dp/013288836X/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_y

Edit: I forgot, have you tried setting the advertiser to non-connectable? That way you should be able to get duplicate scan results
I am dealing with a similar issue, that is, reliably track the RSSI values of multiple advertising devices over time.
It is sad, the most reliable way i found is not nice, rather dirty and battery consuming. It seems due to the number of android devices that handle BLE differently the most reliable.
I start LE scan, as soon as i get a callback i set a flag to stop and start scan again. That way you work around that DUPLICATE_PACKET filter issue since it resets whenever you start a fresh scan.
The ScanResults i dump into a sqlite db wich i shrink and evaluate once every x seconds.
It should be easy to adapt the shrinking to your use case, i.e. removing entries that are older than X, and then query for existance of a device to find out if you received a ScanResult in the last X seconds. However dont put that X value too low, as you must take into account that you still lose alot of advertisement packets on android LE scan, compared to a BLE scan on i.e. bluez..
Edit:
I can add some information i already found for speeding up the performance on Advertisement discovery. It involves modifying and compiling the bluedroid sources and root access to the device. Easiest would be building a full android yourself, i.e. Cyanogenmod.
When a LE scan is running, the bluetooth module sends the scan sesponse via HCI to the bluedroid stack. There various checks are done until it finally gets handed to the Java onScanResult(...) which is accessed via JNI.
By comparing the log of the hci data sent from the bluetooth module (can be enabled in /etc/bluetooth/bt_stack.conf) with debug output in the bluedroid stack aswell as the Java side i noticed that alot of advertisement packets are discarded, especially in some check. i dont really understand, beside that it has something to do with the bluedroid inquiry database
From the documentation of ScanResult we see that the ScanRecord includes the advertisement data plus the scan response data. So it might be that android blocks the report until it got the scan response data/ until it is clear there is no scan response data. This i could not verify, however a possibility.
As i am only interested in rapid updates on the RSSI of those packets, i simply commented that check out. It seems that way every single packet i get from the bluetooth moduly by hci is handed through to the Java side.
In file btm_ble_gap.c in function BOOLEAN btm_ble_update_inq_result(tINQ_DB_ENT *p_i, UINT8 addr_type, UINT8 evt_type, UINT8 *p)
comment out to_report = FALSE; in the following check starting on line 2265.
/* active scan, always wait until get scan_rsp to report the result */
if ((btm_cb.ble_ctr_cb.inq_var.scan_type == BTM_BLE_SCAN_MODE_ACTI &&
(evt_type == BTM_BLE_CONNECT_EVT || evt_type == BTM_BLE_DISCOVER_EVT)))
{
BTM_TRACE_DEBUG("btm_ble_update_inq_result scan_rsp=false, to_report=false,\
scan_type_active=%d", btm_cb.ble_ctr_cb.inq_var.scan_type);
p_i->scan_rsp = FALSE;
// to_report = FALSE; // to_report is initialized as TRUE, so we basically leave it to report it anyways.
}
else
p_i->scan_rsp = TRUE;

Make Bluetooth on Android 2.1 discoverable indefinitely

I'm working on a research project which involves Bluetooth and the Android OS. I need to make Bluetooth discoverable indefinitely in order for the project to continue.
The Problem:
Android limits discoverability to 300 seconds.
I cannot ask the user every 300 seconds to turn discoverability back on as my application is designed to run in the background without disturbing the user.
As far as I am aware, there is no way to increase the time though Android's GUI. Some sources have called this a safety feature, others have called this a bug. There may be a bit of truth in both...
What I'm Trying / Have Tried:
I'm trying to edit a stable release of cyanogenmod to turn the discoverability timer off (it's possible; there's a configuration file that needs to have a single number changed). This isn't working because I'm having verification problems with the resulting package.
During the past week, I downloaded the cyanogenmod source code, changed a relevant class in the hope that it would make Bluetooth discoverable indefinitely, and tried to recompile. This did not work because (a) the repo is frequently changed, leading to an unstable code base which fails to compile (OR, it could be that I'm using it incorrectly; just because it looked like it was the code's fault in many instances doesn't mean I should blame it for all the problems I encountered!) and (b) the repo decides to periodically "ignore" me (but not always, as I have gotten the code base before!), replying to my synchronization/connection attempts with:
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
As you might imagine, the above two issues are problematic and very frustrating to deal with.
More Info:
I'm running Android 2.1 via cyanogenmod (v5 I believe). This means the phone is also rooted.
I have a developer phone, which means that the bootloader is unlocked.
My phone is an HTC Magic (32B).
The Big Question:
How can I make Bluetooth indefinitely discoverable on Android?

See the following link:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/wireless/bluetooth.html#ConnectingDevices
Specifically, the last sentence in the paragraph below:
Enabling discoverability
If you would like to make the local device discoverable to other devices, call startActivityForResult(Intent, int) with the ACTION_REQUEST_DISCOVERABLE action Intent. This will issue a request to enable discoverable mode through the system settings (without stopping your application). By default, the device will become discoverable for 120 seconds. You can define a different duration by adding the EXTRA_DISCOVERABLE_DURATION Intent extra. The maximum duration an app can set is 3600 seconds, and a value of 0 means the device is always discoverable.
So, this should work:
Intent discoverableIntent = new Intent(BluetoothAdapter.ACTION_REQUEST_DISCOVERABLE);
discoverableIntent.putExtra(BluetoothAdapter.EXTRA_DISCOVERABLE_DURATION, 0);
startActivity(discoverableIntent);

If you check out the BluetoothAdapter class
you will find the hidden method:
public void setDiscoverableTimeout(int timeout)
Now you only have to find out how to use it. You have to do a method invocation to do so.

Android - How to enable Bluetooth to be always on?

Two question on Bluetooth development on Android:
Is there a way to enable Bluetooth to be always on (I might have a long device discovery phase in my application) in Android? As far as I can see the default value is a count down from 120s.
Does it exist any open source Bluetooth API implementations?

Bluetooth implementation is now available in the Android 2.0 API.
See this and this.

Enabling Bluetooth to be always on, may not be a good decision, if your only concern is long discovery delay ("battery life"-wise).
As for third-party Bluetooth APIs, the only thing that I've heard of is iAnywhere Blue SDK (from Sybase, not free, only evaluation version available), which covers some of the features, that will be supported in the future from the system/bluetooth and bluez packages.
According to the Android's Bluetooth roadmap, most of the long waited things like Java API, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR will be implemented, at one point in the future.
Good luck with your project.

On 2.3.6 I can keep the device always visible by putting the delay 0:
Intent di = new Intent(BluetoothAdapter.ACTION_REQUEST_DISCOVERABLE);
di.putExtra(BluetoothAdapter.EXTRA_DISCOVERABLE_DURATION, 0);

The Bluez stack on Linux is an open source implementation. It's also available on Windows but the API is much more complete on Linux.
When you say, 'enable Bluetooth to always be on' do you mean, always trying to discover other devices?
Most bluetooth chips have a deep sleep mode, where the chip is mostly down and just comes up a to check for activity on any established links. It will only wake up to full power when you want it to do something (discovery, make a connection) or there is activity on an existing link.
Yeah, it uses more battery power than if the Bluetooth were totally off but it's not a total vampire.

private void ensureDiscoverable() {
if(D) Log.d(TAG, "ensure discoverable");
if (mBluetoothAdapter.getScanMode() !=
BluetoothAdapter.SCAN_MODE_CONNECTABLE_DISCOVERABLE) {
Intent discoverableIntent = new Intent(BluetoothAdapter.ACTION_REQUEST_DISCOVERABLE);
discoverableIntent.putExtra(BluetoothAdapter.EXTRA_DISCOVERABLE_DURATION, 300);
startActivity(discoverableIntent);
}
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/bluetooth/BluetoothAdapter.html#ACTION_REQUEST_DISCOVERABLE

BlueCove is an open-source bluetooth implementation for Java.
It works on a lot of different machines and if correct there is a Android compatible version lurking around somewhere.