createBond doesn't always show pin dialog - bluetooth

After performing a bleScan and giving the user their device to select, I then take that get that device via the getRemoteDevice(address) call.
Once I get that BluetoothDevice object, I then call createBond(). Since createBond() triggers an async operation, I have BroadcastReceiver listening for the results and confirm that the device has paired/bonded when I received a BONDED result in the receiver.
This is pretty standard procedure for bonding with a BT device.
The issue I'm running into is that under seemingly random conditions, the built in pair/connect dialog does not appear.
Through some testing I found that if I swipe down on the phone, long press bluetooth and click "Pair a New Device" and the device shows up in the list...I can then return to my app, call createBond() and the PIN dialog appears.
This tells me there's something iffy with some type of Bluetooth Cache or something along those lines.
I'm trying to determine why this might be and if there's something I should be ensuring that I do BEFORE calling createBond to ensure the pin dialog appears.
I can post relevant code but it's really just a one-liner
boolean bondInitiated = getDevice().createBond();
After I call create bond there's typically a 1-2 second pause and then the pin dialog appears.
Can someone offer some insight here? Is there a better way to pair with a BT device from Android other than calling createBond()
I'd LOVE to just give the user a PIN text box, let them enter the pin shown on the BT device (it's a glucometer) and then pair that way but I've not seen a way to do that.

Unfortunately, there isn't a standard way to always show the pairing dialog to the user. This is because the pairing process is dependant on the hardware, and some OEMs have modified how it works at the OS level. As such, there are variations depending on the hardware that is being used.
However, there might be some "hacks" that you can implement to get this to work. Have a look at this link as it includes details on the bondong process and the pairing popup. It's a bit outdated (3 years ago), but it includes the following paragraph:-
So if you want you can try to make the popup always appear in the
foreground by doing discovering for 1 second before connecting to a
device. It is a bit of a hack but it works.

Related

How can I briefly display a graphic on the screen without a dialog in AppleScript?

I have 2 applescripts (saved as apps) that make webhook calls in a loop to control the volume of my stereo. Each script displays a dialog that asks for a number of ticks to tick the volume up or down, and it loops to make the webhook call each time.
Background: I wrote a program called pi_bose that runs on my raspberry pi to send commands to my Bose Series 12 stereo. It sends codes on the 28Mhz band using a wire as an antenna plugged into one of the GPIO ports. Node red receives the webhook calls and runs that script. But there are various things that can make it fail. The antenna can be loose because the pi has been bumped. Node red isn't running. The program has a small memory leak that causes a problem after having been used for about 6 months. And sometimes there's background interference that makes not every transmission work (I could probably use a longer antenna to address that I guess). But sometimes, whatever is playing on the stereo is just so soft that it's hard to detect the subtle change to the volume. And sometimes, it seems that either the webhook call happens slowly and the volume is changing - it just happens over the course of 20-30 seconds. So...
I know I could do the loop on the pi itself instead of repeating the webhook call, but I would like to see progress on the mac itself.
I'd like some sort of cue that gives me some feedback to let me know each time the webhook call happens. Like, a red dot on the AppleScript app icon or something in the corner of the screen that appears for a fraction of a second each time the webhook call is made.
Alternatively, I could make the script make some sort of sound, but I would rather not disrupt audibly whatever is playing at the time.
Does anyone know how to do that? Is it even possible to display an icon without a dialog window in applescript?

Is there a reliable way to reconnect a paired ZAGG - Logitech Bluetooth Keyboard upon power-up?

I have a bluetooth keyboard that I use on a regular basis. It has a Logitech logo, but is manufactured by ZAGG and has model number Y-R0023.
I have paired the keyboard with my Ubuntu desktop and it works great.
Upon powering up my computer and keyboard, I can sometimes reconnect without having to pair again, but other times I have to remove the existing pairing and reconnect before Ubuntu can receive keystrokes.
Extra information: Ubuntu displays a bluetooth symbol as a status when it connects (regardless if it is able to receive keystrokes or not). This symbol will appear and disappear roughly every 10 seconds until the two devices are able to successfully negotiate a valid connection.
I notice that I have best success when I press 'delete-delete-enter-enter' after powering the ZAGG keyboard up. (Sometimes, just repeatedly pressing a key every second or so seems to work too.)
I am wondering if the "delete-delete-enter" keystroke combination (or some other that I haven't discovered) is recognized by the Logitech BIOS as a special sequence to help retry a paired re-connection. I'd be interested in finding out if this trick works for devices other than those made by ZAGG. Otherwise, it would help just to know if there is a reliable script I can run that calls bluetoothctl to help improve the re-connection. (I want to avoid having to enter a pairing code on subsequent connections).
ZAGG sites and Logitech ones don't say anything about this key combination. So I don't think it's recognized as a special sequence, only advice they give is to re-pair the device when it's not working.
In summary I'm sure they would include this troubleshooting option in manual and/or troubleshooting guide if it was present.

Detecting when an Apple TV 4th generation has woken from sleep

I'm working on some home automation programs and one of the things I want to be able to do is detect when my 4th generation Apple TV has woken from sleep. This will generally only ever happen when someone pressed a button on its Siri remote to wake it up.
I have a PC (connected to the same TV as the Apple TV) that has a Pulse-Eight USB-CEC adapter, so naturally the first thing I tried was using CEC to determine when the Apple TV is awake. Unfortunately it's not reliable, since monitoring the Apple TV's power status to see when it wakes up produces false positives. (I should note that I do not have "Control TVs and Receivers" enabled on the Apple TV, and can't turn it on for the particular project I'm working on because I need the Apple TV to not change the TV's input.)
I'm trying to think of some other way to do this. I'm open to any possibilities, including things like:
Making use of private APIs on the Apple TV
Running an 'always on' program in the background of the Apple TV that sends a signal when the Apple TV wakes up, if that's even possible. (I suspect that it isn't.)
Monitoring the bluetooth communication between the Siri Remote and the Apple TV, if that's possible
Somehow filtering HDMI-CEC commands so that I can turn on 'Control TVs and Receivers', allow the Apple TV's CEC commands for turning on and off the TV, and exclude commands for changing the TV's input.
Any other method, no matter how hacky or ridiculous, as long as it works!
Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm running out of things to try!
I tried to post below on apple discussion / support communities but was told i don't have the right to post this content. Maybe someone in this group can succeed in doing it:
Apple TV 4 CEC integration is great when it works, but it doesn't work all the time and not with all the various equipment out there, you can do a search across forums and you will see lots of unhappy users. I would like to use a raspberry PI to detect when my AppleTV goes to sleep and wakes up and programmatically turn my tv on or off using its RS232C or custom CEC commands.
I used a bonjour services explorer and compared every single result between sleep and on states and there are no differences whatsoever.  I would have expected Apple to welcome such automation projects and make this information readily available with a variable such as status: sleep or status: on. 
Is there a way I could tell the two states apart via the network connection?
If not, could one build a TvOS app which runs on the background and makes this information available to clients somehow?
I finally found a method that seems to work consistently. This method is incredibly hacky and not at all the sort of way I'd prefer to do this, but it's the only one I've found so far that works consistently.
I have taken an old USB webcam and affixed it to the front of my Apple TV so that its lens is directly in front of the Apply TV's front facing light. Whenever the Apple TV is asleep, I simply check for the light turning on by taking images from the camera and analyzing their average luminosity. Since the lens is right next to the light, when it turns on it'll create a huge blown out white circle in the image that's incredibly easy to detect.
As long as the Apple TV is asleep, the light turning on seems to indicate 100% of the time that it has woken up. I have yet to find a single incident of either a false positive or false negative.
Since pressing buttons on the Siri remote causes this light to blink, this also means that I can detect buttons being pressed by looking for changes in the light while the Apple TV is awake. It's not 100% accurate, since some button presses are faster than the frame rate of my crappy old USB webcam, but it works well enough.
I would vastly prefer to find a better method of doing this, like making a request over the LAN to the Apple TV where the response clearly indicates it being awake or asleep, but so far it doesn't look like that's possible.
Here I am, six and a half years later, and I've finally found a better way to get the power state of my Apple TV.
I can simply use pyatv, which has a function named power_state that returns the Apple TV's current power state.

Factory reset ACR1255U-J1 NFC reader

Does anyone know how to reset an Advanced Card Systems NFC reader type ACR1255U-J1? I've sent an escape command to it and it got stuck. When I switch the button at the top I get a purple light for LED1 and orange light for LED2 followed by red light for LED1 and no light for LED2. Any help will be appriciated.
I can see the device through Mac Terminal when it is connected through USB but it is no longer visible when bluetooth is on.
Once the ACS1255U-J1 shows the behavior you described it's basically bricked. It happens because of a stack overflow problem (no pun intended) in the readers' firmware and ACS is currently working to correct it. I've seen it happen repeatedly with very long Escape Commands like the Rewrite Master Key Command Request (36 bytes long) as well as some shorter ones. Depending on the severity of the overflow, you may be able to resurrect the reader by reflashing it with fresh firmware. You can download all the stuff you need from our site here:
http://flomio.com/ACR1255U-J1-FlashTool/
You'll need a Win7 machine to work the tool and even then it'll take a few tries to get the reader in DFU mode. If you run into issues, post support questions on our forums and we'll be happy to help.
That said your device corruption may be beyond repair. This can happen if you've wiped out the boot sector of the flash. You'll know this if the reader fails to enter DFU mode. I've been able to resurrect a few readers but found them lacking some key setting like the serial number field being gone (all zeros). But more just don't enter DFU. We're authorized distributors of ACS products so if you want to RMA your device through us let me know and we can work something out.
UPDATE: Flomio now has the ability to repair bricked ACR1255U-J1 units. You can ping us on our forums for details.

Xilinx Virtex5 Simple I/O

I'm using a Virtex 5 FPGA and want to have a few +5/0 I/O pins to communicate with a microcontroller. The only peripherials I've used on the board so far are pushbuttons and switches and no one I've asked seems to know the simplest way to do this I/O. I've looked around the board specification but haven't found any simple way of doing it. I would appreciate any advice you might have.
This is not an easy thing to do. If you don't have the schematic of the board, then you need to get volt meter with some fine pitch probes and reverse engineer the board.
It is pretty easy if you have 2 boards, with one board it can be really hard since the BGA signals may not be connected to a via and therefore not available on the bottom of the board, and even if they are, then you don't know exactly which pin they are connected to. But with some luck, you can find them since the VIA can only be connected to 4 possible pins surrounding it!
The first thing you need to do is to identify your chip, find the BGA print of the IC from Xilin'x web site.
If your board has some buttons already, then if you are lucky, those signals may be routed to the pins of the FPGA that are available on the bottom of your board. Here are the things you need to do:
Make sure you have good ESD protection to perform these test
Put your voltmeter into 'buzzer' mode
Check the pins of your connector and find out how it is connected, see if there is a pull-up and/or pull-down resistors on the board
when you find the 'active' pin of your connector, start connecting the other probe to the VIAs one by one
When you hear a buzz, make a note of the position (guess or measure the distance between the side of t he IC and the location of the via)
Identify the 4 possible pins that the signal can be connected to
Write a code to get all those 4 signals and connect them to ChipScope
In Chip Scope, capture all 4 signals and see which one is the one with the right connection!
alternative, you can create a design with inputs only, capture all the inputs and put them into a memory block and create a trigger logic to capture all the signals whenever any of the inputs changes, after lots of work and analysis, you will find the correct pins.
Anyway, these are just crazy ideas since this is a really difficult thing to do without having the PCB info of the board.
Good luck with your hacking.

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