Bluetooth Bait and Switch

[Shaggy Hiker]

Ultimately, I need something that runs on an Android tablet to interface with a particular Bluetooth device. Hopefully, we'll be able to get something canned that will work, but I thought I'd start looking into alternatives. I know nothing much about programming with Bluetooth devices, so I started looking into it for what I know best, which would be .NET and Windows, even though that ultimately won't work for me. What I found is that there is a whole library for working with Bluetooth so long as I am willing to go UWP, which seems like a dead-end, ultimately. Otherwise, there are recommendations for one or two third party libraries available via NuGet. I have no doubt that I could get a Windows solution working using one of those, but that ultimately won't work for me.

So, what I'm looking for is some fairly low-level discussion of how interacting with a Bluetooth device works. It appears to be based around sockets, kind of like TCP. Can anybody point me towards resources along those lines?

[techgnome]

Might be an extreme idea, but consider an Electron app ... there's a BT library that you can use... came across it in my tutorials. I have no need for BT so I didn't look into it very far, just noting that it was there, so I don't know at what kind of level it allows for interaction.


-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

Yeah, after more research, I started realizing that accessing Bluetooth isn't all that easy for Windows without third party libraries, but appears much easier for Javascript and Java. That likely reflects the fact that the vast majority of Windows devices probably do not have Bluetooth, while the vast majority of Android devices do. My only Windows computer that have Bluetooth are my Surface Pros, while none of my other Windows computers have Bluetooth. Meanwhile, I'm not sure that I've ever seen an Android device that did NOT have Bluetooth.

I'll leave this open for a bit, to see what responses I get, but it's seeming pretty likely that rather than start with the easier case, I managed to start with the most difficult case.

[Delaney]

In my application, I get access to my Bluetooth device through a serial COM port. don't know if you can do the same on android

[Shaggy Hiker]

I've been pursuing a variety of different approaches. At this time, I'm pulling back a bit, because there are a couple commercial solutions that are looking likely. That'll work or fall apart in the next week, at which point I might be looking into this again. It appears that there is an experimental Bluetooth API that has been around for about a decade and looks viable. Unfortunately, there would remain one further issue, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.