Stream generic data directly to PC via BLE/Bluetooth?

RE: Stream generic data directly to PC via BLE/Bluetooth?

Einar Thorsrud — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 14:31:10 GMT

Hi Scott,

The nRF Connect for desktop tool does not fit your requirement since it relies on a connected nRF5 DK or dongle, and not the native BLE device on the system. Therefore it is based on the pc-ble-driver-js (JavaScript bindings for pc-ble-driver), and does not use any common Bluetooth API's. You can, of course, refer to it if you like, though. The source code is available on GitHub.

I do not see a big reason for looking for a tool that has native support for the Nordic UART service (NUS), since that is probably implemented within a few hours once you know the BLE API of whatever you are using. The only cross-platform BLE API for use with native BLE devices I am aware of is ByBlueZ. I don't know how well it works on Windows, though. If not, it may be that you need to write separate code for each platform in this case.

Br,

Einar

RE: Stream generic data directly to PC via BLE/Bluetooth?

scott.williams.osd — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 21:48:10 GMT

Thanks Einar. One thing I came across was this, nRF Connect App for Desktop: https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-Tools/nRF-Connect-for-desktop

Would this be appropriate? Does it have Nordic UART functionality like the iOS/Android nRF Connect Apps? And, also, is the application source available to allow our software engineer to build with it and modify our Windows/Mac software to be compatible?

Thanks. Please let me know!

RE: Stream generic data directly to PC via BLE/Bluetooth?

Einar Thorsrud — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 15:44:06 GMT

Hi Scott,

You can think of the Nordic UART Service as an example of a custom service for generic data transport. So you can in fact continue to use this on the BLE link, and just skip the physical UART devices in the endpoints. If you make your own custom data streaming service it will probably be more or less the same. So my suggestion is to just keep the NUS service as is if that is something you are happy with.

With the above approach, the question reduces to how you can implement support for this on the PC side without having an nRF dongle. Since you don't want an nRF chip on the PC side, the pc-ble-driver is also irrelevant. (That is a PC side library that is used together with a connectivity firmware on the nRF side, to provide the SoftDevice API on a PC). I am not experienced with Bluetooth development on the Windows platform, and in fact, all BLE development we do for Windows uses the pc-ble-driver and only work with nordic devices. But windows do have native BLE support, and that is probably what you should investigate and use if you are making a Windows only application. There is an example here. (There are also other cross-platform libraries such as PyBluez which work very well on Linux, but I am not sure how stable it is on Windows).

Br,

Einar