Using the SDK with pc-ble-driver

[Eliot Stock]

Our product is a peripheral on the nRF51822. We develop on Mac and use gcc, make, etc with Visual Studio Code rather than Eclipse. Recently, we started getting close to production readiness and our contract manufacturer uses Windows. So I started writing a central app for the testing we'll be doing at the end of the production line using the pc-ble-driver project. The central will connect, do discovery, write to one custom characteristic and enable notifications on another, then pretty much just log the notifications and disconnect. It'll have no need for bonding.

I'd quite like to use the ble_db_discovery library in the SDK. Obviously the SDK is not written to be built on Windows with CMake and I've already hit some issues in the build where just using -D__CC_ARM and hoping for the best isn't going to cut it, such as __INLINE. Has anyone else tried to do this? Am I barking up the wrong tree?

[Jørgen Kvalvaag]

If you don't mind using python, you should check out the pc-ble-driver-py project, which is just a python wrapper for the pc-ble-driver. The current implementation comes with service discovery procedures, and is pip-installable. Linky: github.com/.../pc-ble-driver-py

[Eliot Stock]

Both the Python binding and the Node.js binding to the pc-ble-driver code look great, but because this is a Windows machine on the factory floor, the CM is quite strict with the toolchain that we add to it and would like to avoid putting Iron Python or Node on there. Which is a shame. I'm trying to keep it strictly to C/C++/.NET code for now.

[Eliot Stock]

The short answer here is, yes, this is barking up the wrong tree. I tried porting the BLE db discovery module to Windows but given the dependency tree from there, I quickly ended up pulling in large parts of the SDK that were never going to be easily ported. The pc-ble-driver codebase alone is pretty low level and I'd encourage anyone who can to use the Python or Node.js bindings instead.