Difficulties understanding transparant UART

[spruce]

Hi All,

I have a measuring device that needs to send UART data over BLE to a PC with BLE dongle or Macbook with built in BLE.
My test users need to open up a webpage in Chrome, connect to my device using Chrome built in Bluetooth API.

I collect all the data to the cloud this way and my user can help me labeling the data via buttons in the webapp for machine learning purposes.

Can this been done without using a special USB dongle?

Many examples show module to module communication and module to smartphone app communication.

So first I thought, ok the GATT profile used for transparant UART is proprietary and that is why you only can do this with 2 nordic modules and need an special Nordic usb dongle on the Macbook side.

But than I see third party android terminal apps perfectly showing UART data, so module to device is possible?

I really don't get it why third party Android developers can access UART data from BLE modules and that there are practically zero examples of accessing UART data from the Macbook build in BLE.

  

[Sigurd]

Hi,

I don't see why it shouldn't work. I don't think you need a dongle, as long as the computer have built-in BLE support.

We have a reference web app made with Polymer using the Web Bluetooth API. Maybe that can be useful for you.

https://github.com/NordicPlayground/webapp-nordic-thingy

[spruce]

Thanks for the Github (doesn't get me further yet) since this is for thingy.
I have nRF9160 DK laying around can you help me with examples to make a similar proof of concept on this development kit?

[Sigurd]

spruce said:

Thanks for the Github (doesn't get me further yet) since this is for thingy.

It's an example, you can change and modify it to fit your needs.

spruce said:

I have nRF9160 DK

Since you are developing a Bluetooth application, it's maybe better to use a nRF52 DK for this.

spruce said:

can you help me with examples to make a similar proof of concept

I don't have any experience with webapps. Maybe someone in the Web Bluetooth community can help you further.