I'm looking for a recommendation for a device for testing BLE devices with Windows. The Windows API itself seems really flaky, and doesn't give much debug information, so I'm thinking a standalone device, probably that plugs in over USB and skips the Windows BLE stack altogether is the way to go. What I'm looking for would:
Be able to connect to a GattServer and do all the typical operations ( read, notify, etc )
Nice to haves:
Give debug information about the connection state
Trace packets
Have some kind of automation hook, that is, COM, CLI, etc so that the data read from a characteristic could be dumped into Python etc
Anyone have any products they would recommend?
Related
I am doing some research on the WebUSB API for our company because we are going to start to manufacture devices in house.
Our current device manufacture comes with an application so the team can plug the device into a computer and diagnose it. Their application allows us to read outputs from the device, as well as pushing commands/configuration to the device over a wired connection.
Since this device is 100% ours, we are also responsible for building out the diagnostic tooling. We need some sort of interface that allows a user to read outputs and send commands/configuration to the device over a wired USB connection.
Is the webUSB the correct API? If not, what are some suggestions for accomplishing the requirement? Are we limited to building some sort of desktop or mobile application?
I would recommend resources below to read to help you understand if the WebUSB API fits your needs or not:
https://web.dev/devices-introduction/ helps you pick the appropriate API to communicate with a hardware device of your choice.
https://web.dev/build-for-webusb/ explains how to build a device to take full advantage of the WebUSB API.
From what you describe, WebUSB isn't strictly required but won't hurt either.
First and foremost, you will need to implement the USB interfaces reading data and sending configurations. It will be a custom protocol, and not one of the standard USB device classes such as HID, video or mass storage. The details of the protocol and if you use control, interrupt or bulk transfers is your choice.
I'm assuming you will connect the devices to Windows PCs, and you likely don't want to put money into writing device drivers. If so, the easiest approach is to add the required descriptors and control requests required for Microsoft OS 2.0 Descriptors. That way, the WinUSB driver will be installed automatically when the device is plugged in.
Using the WinUSB API, a Windows application will then be able to communicate with the USB device. No additional drivers are needed. (On macOS and Linux it's even easier as you don't need the Microsoft OS 2.0 Descriptors in the first place.)
On top of that you can implement the additional descriptors and control requests for WebUSB. It will provide the additional benefit that you can write a web application (instead of a native application) for communicating with the USB device. (Currently, you are restricted to the Chrome browser.) WebUSB devices should implement the WinUSB descriptors as the alternative (.INF files, manual installation process) is a pain.
The already mentioned web page https://web.dev/build-for-webusb/ is a complete example of how to implement it.
I use the BLED112 and want to make it act like a HID keyboard.
The BLED112 receives the keystroke from the Mobile. For example, "p".
Then the dongle act like a keyboard so we can see the "p" is written on Notepad of PC.
Sending data from Mobile to dongle is not matter. I have already done.
My problem is to send the keystroke event to the PC so the dongle works like a keyboard.
I want an example or the full guide.
Thanks.
BLED112 is a Bluetooth Low Energy dongle provided by Bluegiga (Now acquired by Silicon labs). If you have studied the BLED112 user manual and bluegiga API reference documents, you'd understand that there can be two possible ways to read/write data via BLED112:
Use bgscript
use the bglib library into your C/C++ application
BLED112 is enumerated as a virual com port. I don't recall the name of the windows application that comes with BLED112 but it sounded like BLEGUI or something. This application uses the APIs to handle connections, read and write events. In a nutshell, you need to implement the same thing that this application does. For that, you can leverage the logs it spits on the console. This log will help you with all the commands you need to send and all the response that you need to handle.
Then, you need to make your application communicate with the virtual com port over which these commands will be send and responses will be received at.
Once you establish this, you'd be able to display your keystrokes.
It is a substantial work if you haven't worked with BLE. But like people say, there aren't free lunches!
Over the last couple of years I have been looking for an easy way to control a few relays from Javascript. I want to build a web App to control starting sequence horns for sailing races.
I recently discovered webUSB and it seems like exactly what I need. A direct connection from JS in chrome to the USB world. Simple coding in a language I already use.
On the hardware side I am having trouble finding a product that is compatible. Googling USB Relay finds 100's of products that all seem to rely on some proprietary SW for the OS. I can find lots of educational demo's that turn an LED on and off.
Does anyone have any ideas where to find such a product?
While I'm sure you will be able to find USB relays that can be controlled via WebUSB, most USB relays will probably come with some kind of serial port driver, e.g. https://numato.com/product/1-channel-usb-powered-relay-module uses a CDC serial port driver. These can be controlled using Web Serial, available in Chrome 77 and later behind a feature flag. For a tutorial, see https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/web-serial/
Explainer: https://github.com/WICG/serial/blob/gh-pages/EXPLAINER.md
API docs: https://wicg.github.io/serial/
If you search for "5V USB Relay Programmable Computer Control For Smart Home" on eBay, you will also find low-cost relays that use HID instead. The advantage of these is that you don't need any serial port or USB drivers, as it will use the operating system's built-in HID drivers. For that you can use WebHID. For more info, see https://github.com/robatwilliams/awesome-webhid.
We have bought BLED112 to interface our target via BT.
An android app interacting with target via BT & USB (HID).
We have used some Bluetooth communication to write a program and send data to dongle.
Now can somebody here having any experince in converting that BT data to a HID signal.
Have anybody tried that?
Is there any BGScript code which we need to write to achieve that?
Please let me know if the thought is completely wrong.
Referring to a comment above which states,
We are writing an Android App which can send data to BLED112 over BLE interface or GATT. My question is how can I convert that data (basically a command) to an HID (key event), correct me if my understanding is wrong?
If I understand the use-case correctly, I think, in the initial stages of the development, you will need to use the BLE-GUI utility that BlueGiga provides.
With that utility you can see the communication between the BLED112 Dongle and the BLE112 Module. BLED112 shall be simulating what the android app would do?
First, you will need to know the GATT structure stored in BLED112 to write to or read from the BLED112.
Secondly, the way BLE112 works is an event-based implementation. Going through the API reference document for BLE112 shall help you understand the events generation conditions and codes that are generated modified when a characteristic value is updated by the android application, or read by android application. You get events for connection, disconnection, read from, write to, notification enabled for, indication enabled for, etc.
On the BLE112 side, depending upon what service and what characteristics in that service is going to be used for data transfer between Client (Android App) and Server (BLE112), you need to write suitable implementation in event callback handlers.
There is a standard service called Human Interface Device which has a reserved UUID: 0x1812.
Once you configure your BLE112 as a HID over GATT device, your android app shall see a service with UUID: 0x1812. Parse the service descriptor and get the characteristics bundled up into the service. You can read from or write to that service depending upon access parameters set in gatt.xml
As an example, say, if it is a Keyboard, you can send the scancode for (make and break) of the key depending upon what key is pressed. How to get a scancode is out of the scope of this question anyway, and sadly I had worked on PS2 keyboards, so I don't really know how to get the scancode from a USB keyboard.
So, you have the scancode for the key pressed, and you know the characteristics to write that into. Write it, the application should enable the Notifications for that characteristics, so that it is notified whenever the key is pressed and value is written into the characteristics. To let application enable notifications or indications for the characteristics, study the developer guide that talks about how to write a gatt.xml for Bluegiga-based BLE devices. I'll give you a hint: in xml, in the characteristics configuration you have to write notify="true".
About parsing of the service and characteristics in Android, Unfortunately I am not an android developer, but an embedded developer, I know how the BLE112 module part is to be implemented, while I have no insight of how android parses the data. But, there are plenty of question and discussions about it online, which you might understand better than me since you have an android background.
I wonder whether it is possible to emulate a specific bluetooth device like a Remote Controller for a TV or another device with my PC. I'd be okay with installing an additional hardware device for my computer (e. g. a BlueTooth PCIe card).
I imagined something like "recording" all single commands of my original remote controller using my Bluetooth card and afterwards use these recorded commands to turn on my TV for example.
Is something like this possible (with additional hardware maybe)?
Of course this is possible. Bluetooth is just a protocol and you can impliment it in your custom software to emulate all kinds of devices. If you need to emulate simple devices like keyboard or mouse, there are many ready solutions like this.
But if you have non standard device, there won't be any ready solutions and you will have to implement it yourself. What can help you:
If you have some kind of controller for PC and you want to emulate device with unknown protocol, you can use WireShark or other sniffer to understand what's going on.
There is an emulator called BT-Sim, but it is so poorly documented that I can't even guess what it does.
You can can take as example different android software like described in answers to this question.
You can check different program samples for PC like this.
For hardware you need only simple Bluetooth dongle. However, if you want to spy on some BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) devices, you can buy hardware sniffer like this.
(At least in Windows 10) Microsoft Store has an application called "Bluetooth LE Explorer" which is able to simulate different kind of Bluetooth GATT profiles as a peripheral.