Bluetooth low energy and BlueZ5

Bluetooth USB-BT4LE
1

I recently purchased a “Plugable USB-BT4LE Bluetooth 4.0 USB Adapter”, I still need to wait for it to arrive, but I had soem questions.

I would like to implement a few functionalities based on GATT profile for a custom hardware, and if it works out it will be our recommended way to synch to our hardware.

In order to get GATT on low energy, do I need BlueZ5.0 (kernel is already 3.10), but I was wondering how others could get this to work with LE without BlueZ5.0 and above.

2

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us about Bluetooth LE support through our dongle.

Could you tell me the Linux distro and version you will be using?

We haven’t had a chance to experiment much with using the Bluetooth adapter in Linux beyond verifying basic function, especially working with LE, so I can’t give a clear answer to your question. We would be very interested in hearing about your project and what your experiences are.

Thank you,

David
Plugable Support

3

Thanks for the fast reply!

I am currently running a Fedora 19.

I have a working example in Android (and iOS), but I need a proper Linux desktop application (and later maybe Windows and OSX), it is a very advanced fitness device, all I can say.

Regards,
dashesy

4

Sounds like a great project! I’m currently rather dissatisfied with my current bluetooth fitness product.

If I get any more info about LE in Linux, I’ll let you know. I’m the one supposed to be messing around with that here, but we are pretty understaffed at the moment, so a lot of time goes into support instead of pushing the frontiers of applications.

David

5

Just to let you know, the dongle works great on Linux.
Had to implement GAP/GATT over L2CAP because BlueZ5 does not have GAP profile, and thus could not simply plug into DBUS, but it was not very hard (some normal socket programming and looking at BlueZ code).
BlueZ5 can however can be used to find advertising nodes, otherwise hci library should be used, which needs root priviledge to work.

dashesy

6

Hi,
I am using Plugable USB-BT4LE Bluetooth 4.0 USB Adapter to support bluetooth low energy on a device having Linux kernel 3.0.94 and the Bluetooth stack I am trying to use is bluez5.x.
I am able to configure using hciconfig and am able to scan classic bluetooh devices using " hcitool scan " but not able to scan low energy Bluetooth devices using “hcitool lescan”.
could anyone help me…

Thanks
Rajender

7

Rajender,

“hcitool lescan” does indeed work here for me, make sure to install hcitool from Bluez5, it is a different package.