If I don't have a Bluetooth LE device am I just out of luck with trying to write a program?

Question

I see questions surrounding issues such as "Device Unsupported" in many posts on this website and on the internet, so I feel like the problems I am having are not unique.

What perplexes me (and trust me I have searched all day) is that I recently bought a new Macbook Pro computer (surely the BT on this thing is LE), upgraded to Mavericks, and am using Xcode 5. But no matter, what sample code I download, whether from the BT SIG or CSR, etc., I always get the same basic errors (on the iOS Simulator):

Something to the effect of "Device Unsupported" AND Something about how it can't run because it's not powered on (and I did try to work around by wrapping the central.state call in an if block)

So, are the people like me who are starting to code Bluetooth today just screwed if we don't have LE devices? Did all of the BT code prior to 4.0 fall off the face of the earth or get deprecated?

Is there a simple way to force my code to run in some type of "non-LE" mode?

As for the code I'm using, I downloaded the Quick Start kit from the BT SIG, but nothing works, even simple scan programs that I have found. Ugh, any ideas out there?

My ultimate goal is to write something that will run without errors, load on my iPhone 4, and scan and pair with my car's stereo and grab all of the peripheral advertisements that it is sending out to see what all I can do with (to) the stereo.

Thanks all.

Answer 1

crawdaddy18, Bluetooth Smart/4.0/LE are fundamentally different technologies then what we'll call Bluetooth Classic (2.0/2.1/EDR/BR...this is the stuff you are referring to with your car audio example). If you want to see what's going on with your car stereo, see what profiles it supports (should be listed in the documentation). Then take a look here:

https://developer.bluetooth.org/TechnologyOverview/Pages/Profiles.aspx#Profiles

This page lists all of the 'classic' profiles. You should find the ones that match your car on the list. You'll then know what functionality your car stereo supports.

Then, it's off to the races with OS documentation to look at the object models for classic Bluetooth. Usually these are either supported by an object model that represents the profile or are wrangled through RFCOM somehow...but each OS is a bit different.

But most of the tools that are out there, including the Application Accelerator, are geared to let you explore LE (Smart) devices out there. If you want to use something like the Application Accelerator to view non-LE devices, you'll have to re-jigger the code to switch the object models that you use in the OS' SDK. The reason that most recent tools you are finding now are geared towards the LE side of things is that that is where the massive growth in appcessories (and the Bluetooth industry) is heading. But there are TONS of sample code out there to help to create an app to scan and connect to classic Bluetooth devices as well.

Answer 2

While your computer does have Bluetooth Low Energy/Bluetooth 4.0/Bluetooth Smart (they are all different names for the same thing) capabilities, these are not available to the simulator. A while ago you could add an additional BT4.0 dongle to the Mac and then access that from the simulator, but this is no longer supported - see Does the iPhone simulator in Xcode support Bluetooth Low Energy?

You can develop BT4.0/BLE code in Xcode for OSX with just your computer, but if you want to develop and test iOS code you will need a BLE capable iOS device (iPhone 4S or later, iPad mini/3rd gen/Air or an iPod Touch 5th generation)

Access to non BT4 devices is only via the Apple MFI program, with the exception of a few generic profiles, such as handsfree & A2DP streaming - but these are exposed to your program as audio devices, not as Bluetooth devices.

If you have an iPhone 4S (not iPhone 4) then you can use the LightBlue app from the App Store to see if your car stereo is advertising any BLE services (which it probably isn't).