Any available DLL or XP?

1

I would like to use this module as master on a PC to communicate with a Bluetooth slave currently under development. Do you have a .DLL that I can use to communicate with our PC software, generally on XP or Windows 7?

2

Hi Don,

Thank you for posting. We don’t have any special DLLs for our Bluetooth adapter. However communication is possible using the Windows APIs. A lot depends on whether you be using classic Bluetooth or Bluetooth Low Energy and what kind of communication you will be performing. Most Classic Bluetooth uses specific profiles, and the best choice for communication of generic data in XP or 7 would be the serial port profile that emulates a serial port on each end.

If you could give more details about your project, I could give more details.

3

I currently am completing a BLE master and slave in a low end system. Just wanted to use PC for end user diagnostics. I am using microchip parts where after connecting and bonding I use their UART interface between the two nodes, making it pretty easy. I’ve done a USB/CAN interface in the past, have lots of different PC code talking to CAN over that interface using that DLL. Almost easier to just replace the USB/CAN interface with a USB/Bluetooth Master and reuse everything else in the PC. I am a “marginal” C++ programmer but do good enough to get by. I researched the windows bluetooth interface functions tonight and have not found a complete simple C++ interface example yet. It’s the PC interface code that is the issue, I have the master and slave devices running.

4

Hi Don,

Thank you for these details. I haven’t had experience with CAN, so I wouldn’t know what a USB/CAN interface would look like, but I don’t think you could use much of your code.

For Bluetooth, the USB aspect of the interface part of the physical (bottom) layer in the stack, and you would still need the Bluetooth stack on the PC side to receive the Bluetooth packets from the USB controller and interpret them. So any interface app you would write would be working with the Windows Bluetooth stack and not USB.

However, there is a deeper issue. The Windows XP and 7 Bluetooth stacks don’t support Bluetooth Low Energy. So you wouldn’t have the ability to connect with or receive data from a BLE device in these two operating systems. BLE support was not added to Windows until Windows 8, and has been pretty rudimentary until Windows 10.

I hope this helps.