Is there a serial port profile for BLE?

[Guest]

Is there any equivalent to the SPP profile from Bluetooth Classic? I've always used this as a way to transmit custom data using Bluetooth, but I can't seem to find anything equivalent for BLE.

[Ole Morten]

No, there isn't really any SPP equivalent. However, with BLE, it is important to understand that all the profile and service support is entirely in the application space. This is opposed to the situation in Bluetooth Classic, where it seems to me that all profiles used in the application actually had to be natively supported by the stack used.

This means that with BLE, there isn't really a need for a serial port service to transmit custom data, since you can easily make your custom service, that is specially tailored for the data your application needs to transfer. This avoids the need for cramming all kinds of data into serial packages, and most often this leads to much cleaner data handling strategies and hence applications.

We're working on an application note explaining how to build a custom service for the S110, and I'll add a link here as soon as it's published. For now, I'd recommend taking a look at the battery service (ble_bas.c, ble_bas.h), and trying to understand it at least partially and building from there.

Edit: The application note is now out; nAN-36.

[Ole Morten]

Sorry for the delay in answering this. Unfortunately no news on the schedule for the app note.

As for your questions on host support, Henning, they may be better suited in a separate question. It won't be covered by the app-note. However, to answer it briefly most new OS-es from now seems to expose native GATT APIs, making it easy to connect to BLE devices and using their services. It won't give you a normal serial port, but APIs that still should be quite easy to use. This is applicable for Windows 8, iOS from version 5 and Android from 4.3.