Bluetooth Low Energy Sensor Simulator

Question

First of all, I spent more than 10 hours of searching for a solution on Google...

I'm working on an app for athletes, doing sports like running or cycling. It should be based on Bluetooth LowEnergy. I have a real heartbeat sensor device to work with and there is the problem.

The Problem is that the sensor doesn't always work if I want to test the scan or something. My phone isn't able to find the sensor all the time, it works just one out of 30 attempts. So what I want to ask is, is there a way to simulate a BLE sensor device like a heartbeat-sensor (over the PC for example)?

I have devices running 4.3 and higher (Samsung, LG and a Sony smartphone), so that shouldn't be the problem. Furthermore I already had a success in connecting to a BLE-Heartbeat sensor, but for testing it's really hard to work with a real sensor device (because of the problem that I can't find it all the time).

Hope my problem is understandable and somebody can help me!

Answer 1

As @bobh says, an old iOS device running a custom app would work as a test BLE peripheral. And I bought an iPod Touch for just that purpose.

Unfortunately Android has only introduced native BLE support as of 4.3 and won't yet work in "peripheral" mode.

There are cheaper alternatives too. There are many BLE dev kits out there: https://developer.bluetooth.org/DevelopmentResources/DevelopmentPlatforms/Pages/Development-Platforms.aspx

If you don't want to mess around with wires and breadboards then you could try BlueGiga's programmable BLE USB dongle. It's about 26 bucks and they have example code for the Heart Rate Profile so your life would be very easy: http://www.bluegiga.com/en-US/products/bluetooth-4.0-modules/bled112-bluetooth-smart-dongle/

Answer 2

If you have an old iPhone 4S or iPad 3 and are an iPhone dev (or jailbroken device), you can prog it to be a test device https://github.com/AttackPattern/BlueSim And tweek the sensor characteristics. Works on a Mac with old Xcode 5 and BLE dongle but requires some work. github