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]

...(continued) So, other devices could pretend to be an already-paired-up HID, and thus pair automatically with your iPhone, even though your device had never seen them before. Bluetooth pairing is not supposed to be possible without your approval, for obvious security reasons, so this bug was fixed. The solution was simple: don't allow unencrypted HID connections."

Full article here: nakedsecurity.sophos.com/.../

Is this the reason why I am not able to get the HID Keyboard example to work on iOS8.4? Does the demo use an unencrypted HID connection?

Thanks, Ken