Mares Quad with BLE Interface

Berthold Stoeger bstoeger at mail.tuwien.ac.at
Tue Apr 10 14:40:10 PDT 2018


On Dienstag, 10. April 2018 22:10:23 CEST Dirk Hohndel wrote:

> The question is, can any of this be well documented or even automated?
> Berthold, any suggestions?

Well, ultimately my endeavours were not really successful, as I never managed 
to get the app to respond to my messages. All I got was the initial handshake. 
Moreover, I should have realized from the start that it's just a variant of 
the G2. At least I learnt what BLE and DBUS are.

The easy part was dumping the structure of the BLE interface ("the 
characteristics") using Qt/BlueZ. I suppose tools that do this exist, 
otherwise I can quickly string something together.

The hard(er) part was setting up a server. Out of a number of options,
this BlueZ-based server: https://github.com/nettlep/gobbledegook was the most 
successful. But it had some limitations: I couldn't set all the 
characteristics (IIRC the vendor string). Also, to advertise as the Aladin 
Sport, I had to set my hostname accordingly. :) At the time, this looked to me 
like BlueZ limitations. But I didn't investigate further, once Linus realized 
that it's simply a G2-variant.

In summary, cloning the structure of a dive computer and catching the initial 
message of the mobile app can probably be automated rather easily with certain 
limitations. If there is interest, I could try this based on a BlueZ backend 
(i.e. no Windows). But note that I'll be travelling the next two weeks and 
have reduced time and internet connectivity.

Berthold


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