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by FrenchyJiby 3486 days ago
Anyone have a good introduction to Bluetooth ~4.0 + reasonable documentation ?

I've always loved bluetooth, the concept of P2P file exchange got me through high school[1] to think about all the levels of tech involved in making your music shared with someone else's phone, but very let down by the documentation and implementation aspect.

As a curious hacker who would like to decentralize his life, I've always wanted to start programming stuff over Bluetooth for any task (remove dependency on internet for purely-local services). But when I tried actually doing so, I was met with an incredibly complex ecosystem I couldn't find RFCs for (or Russian equivalent), with only Bluez as partial reference [2].

I got the impression that if you're not some deep pocketed company or are doing something with phones (preferably with IoT as key buzzword), you're not welcome to the Bluetooth(®) club.

[1] My first bluetooth headset, a Jabra BT620s, bought for 30€ online, is still functional (if a little beaten) after 14 years, delivering about 6 hours of music streaming before recharge. I had to use earbuds recently for a project, and got myself really crossed with the wires thing. How pampered I have been !

[2] At the time I was interested in using BTLE with a linux laptop that clearly supported it, and a flagship Nexus 5. I gave up when I realised at the time, Bluez had only command line tools to access the Low Energy stuff, and some guy had to reverse-engineer the binaries to access some level of API. I really hope this changed/changes.

1 comments

https://people.csail.mit.edu/albert/bluez-intro/c54.html is a great intro.

Reading the code here is a good second step. https://github.com/sandeepmistry/noble

After you've gone through those, the bluetooth spec is useful for specific questions.