Bluez Programming

12
votes

I'm programming in BlueZ on my Raspberry Pi with an USB Bluetooth dongle. I need to be able to programmatically connect to an Arduino BT, the problem is that the Bluetooth module of the Arduino is still using legacy pairing so whenever I try to open a socket to the device I get a Permission Denied. How do I send along a PIN to complete the pairing request through BlueZ?

1
cbluetootharduinobluez
Have you test with the simple-agent? – Ôrel
I want to do it without third party software, just through the bluez C API. – Hatted Rooster
Have try this: stackoverflow.com/questions/14820004/… – Ôrel
I would suggest you use the bluez DBUS APIs rather than the internal hcitools code. It's better supported and at a higher level. If you go that route, what you need to do is to register your application as an Agent. Then whenever a BT authentication is required, your Agent will receive the PIN/passkey request. Please see the bluez agent doc for the API. Or you can initiate a pairing using the Device api. See the device device doc for details. – kaylum
@Alan Au it looks like those API's are both for Python, is there no documentation for C? – Hatted Rooster

1 Answers

16
votes

You might want to check out the main.c file in the client folder of the most recent Bluez source code. It's the source code for the bluetoothctl tool. Run it too. The source code shows exactly how they use GDBus, including proxies, agents, calling methods like described in the API (/doc folder) and all that. It's in C and uses the high level API.

I suggest you step through the code because it took me 2 weeks endlessly trying to understand Bluez in C and the fact that there's no documentation, but when I read that main.c file I was ready in a day. Read up on proper Dbus API documentation and more importantly the concepts. Some documents that helped me:

The gdbus tool: https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/gdbus.html

These contain all the calls to gdbus and objects in the main.c file and explain them very well. https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/gdbus-convenience.html

D-Feet, an invaluable tool to inspecting and learning about Dbus on your system. Try checking out the /bluez bus. https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/DFeet?action=show&redirect=DFeet

or

sudo apt-get install d-feet

Not much of a tutorial, but worth a read to understand some concepts, as the bluetoothctl tool fits into what they're trying to say here. http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html

The bluetoothctl creates an interactive shell though, so it might not be wise to waste time trying to fit in your code, but just pick what you need from it.