Building Bluetooth LE devices

While waiting for my flic.io buttons to turn up I’ve been playing with building my own Bluetooth Low Energy devices.

Since I already had a couple of sensors hooked up to publish their values via MQTT I thought I would try and build a bridge between MQTT and BLE.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi, a Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongle and a NodeJS npm module called bleno.

It turned out to be petty easy, first a short file to set up the BLE service and connect to MQTT:

var util = require('util');
var bleno = require('bleno');
var mqtt = require('mqtt');

var BlenoPrimarySerivce = bleno.PrimaryService;

var TopicCharacteristic = require('./topicCharacteristic');

var config = require("./config");

var client = mqtt.connect(config.broker);

var topicCharacteristic = new TopicCharacteristic(config);

client.on('connect', function(){
  client.subscribe(config.topic);
});

client.on('message',function(topic, message){
  topicCharacteristic.update(message);
});

bleno.on('stateChange', function(state){
  if (state === 'poweredOn') {
    bleno.startAdvertising('mqtt', ['ba42561bb1d2440a8d040cefb43faece']);
  } else {
    bleno.stopAdvertising();
  }
});

bleno.on('advertisingStart', function(error){
  if(!error) {
  	bleno.setServices([
  	  new BlenoPrimarySerivce({
  	  	uuid: 'ba42561bb1d2440a8d040cefb43faece',
  	  	characteristics: [
  	  	  topicCharacteristic
  	  	]
  	  })
  	]);
  }
});

And then something to add the characteristic for the topic:

var util = require('util');
var bleno = require('bleno');

function TopicCharacteristic(config, client) {
	bleno.Characteristic.call(this, {
		uuid: '6bcb06e2747542a9a62a54a1f3ce11e6',
		properties: ['read', 'write', 'notify'],
		descriptors: [
			new bleno.Descriptor({
				uuid: '2901',
				value: 'Topic: ' + config.topic
			})
		]
	});

	this._value = new Buffer(0);
	this._updateValueCallback = null;
	this._client = client;
	this._topic = config.topic;
}

util.inherits(TopicCharacteristic, bleno.Characteristic);

TopicCharacteristic.prototype.onWriteRequest = function(data, offset, withoutResponse, callback) {
	this._value = data;
	client.publish(this._topic, data);
	callback(this.RESULT_SUCCESS);
}


TopicCharacteristic.prototype.onReadRequest = function(offset, callback) {
	callback(this.RESULT_SUCCESS, this._value);
}

TopicCharacteristic.prototype.onSubscribe = function(maxValueSize, updateValueCallback) {
	this._updateValueCallback = updateValueCallback;
}

TopicCharacteristic.prototype.onUnsubscribe = function () {
	this._updateValueCallback = null;
}

TopicCharacteristic.prototype.update = function(value) {
	this._value = value;
	if (this._updateValueCallback) {
		this._updateValueCallback(this._value);
	}
}

module.exports = TopicCharacteristic;

I’ve used 2 randomly generated UUIDs, one for the service and one for the characteristic.

The code should allow you to read the last value published, publish a new value and subscribe to notifications when new values arrive.

I pulled together a quick Android app to subscribe to the notifications and update when a new value is published and it seams to be working well.

The code is all up on Github and on npmjs so feel free to have a play.

You can test it with the Bluez gatttoool.

[hardillb@bagend ~]$ gatttool -b 00:1A:7D:DA:71:15 -I
[00:1A:7D:DA:71:15][LE]> connect
Attempting to connect to 00:1A:7D:DA:71:15
Connection successful
[00:1A:7D:DA:71:15][LE]> primary
attr handle: 0x0001, end grp handle: 0x0005 uuid: 00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
attr handle: 0x0006, end grp handle: 0x0009 uuid: 00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
attr handle: 0x000a, end grp handle: 0x000e uuid: ba42561b-b1d2-440a-8d04-0cefb43faece
[00:1A:7D:DA:71:15][LE]> characteristics 
handle: 0x0002, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0003, uuid: 00002a00-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0004, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0005, uuid: 00002a01-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0007, char properties: 0x20, char value handle: 0x0008, uuid: 00002a05-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x000b, char properties: 0x1a, char value handle: 0x000c, uuid: 6bcb06e2-7475-42a9-a62a-54a1f3ce11e6
[00:1A:7D:DA:71:15][LE]> char-write-req 0x000d 0300
Characteristic value was written successfully
Notification handle = 0x000c value: 42 61 72 
Notification handle = 0x000c value: 48 65 6c 6c 6f 57 6f 72 6c 64 
Notification handle = 0x000c value: 54 65 73 74 69 6e 67 20 31 32 33 
[00:1A:7D:DA:71:15][LE]> 
[00:1A:7D:DA:71:15][LE]> quit

The lines that start Notification handle contain the bytes published, in this case

• Bar
• HelloWorld
• Testing 123