HID Keyboard Demo - works for iOS 7 but not iOS 8

[ki15686]

Hello,

I am trying to use the HID Keyboard Demo (ble_HID_keyboard_template from arduino sdk) . I'm using a RedBearLabs Blend Arduino with the nrF8001.

It works great with iOS 7 (iphone 5)

However, I am not able to get it to work with iOS 8.4 (using iphone 4S). It sometimes pairs (requires multiple attempts), and when it does pair I know it is sending the character "A" to the phone. However, the letter "A" never shows up on the phone.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a work-around for this?

Thank you, Ken

[Hung Bui]

Hi Ken,

Sorry for the late response. We have received report about the issue with the letter missing on the phone when using nRF8001 with Arduino. We have reported it back to Apple and also doing investigation on our side.

About the issue the the phone sometime didn't pair ( as you mentioned). How frequently does that happen ? What happened when it didn't pair ? Could you capture a sniffer trace when pairing fail ?

[ki15686]

Hi Hung,

I just came across this article about iOS8.1

"The first fix in Apple's list is a patch to the Bluetooth stack. It seems that in iOS 8, unencrypted Bluetooth connections were accepted if they came from HIDs, or Human Interface Devices. Your iPhone already has a keyboard (the on-screen one) accessible to anyone with physical access to an unlocked device, so allowing unencrypted connections from add-on HIDs sounds as though it should be low risk. But an unencrypted connection means that there is no shared secret between that device and your iPhone, and thus no way to authenticate the device when it connects....