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Jakeler / ble-serial

"RFCOMM for BLE" a UART over Bluetooth low energy (4+) bridge for Linux, Mac and Windows
https://blog.ja-ke.tech/tags/#bluetooth
MIT License
263 stars 37 forks source link

Additional configuration options and automated connections #11

Closed AGlass0fMilk closed 3 years ago

AGlass0fMilk commented 3 years ago

Hi!

I think in order for this tool to be more useful, there needs to be more configuration allowed. For example, connection parameters, such as connection interval and MTU, can severely affect latency. Configuring these in a generic manner will likely break support for many BLE modules. Therefore, these things should be able to be specified in a succinct way.

Further, in order to achieve more "USB to UART"/FTDI-like convenience, there should be a way to automate connections. This should be simple to achieve in Linux. For Windows, perhaps we could make a service that runs at startup and automatically connects to previously-connected BLE devices using pywin32?

These automated connections and device-specific connection parameters could be configured using a .ini or .json file.

@Jakeler thoughts?

Jakeler commented 3 years ago

Yes, that is a good idea, if we are adding more options config files would be useful, instead of too many parameters. Still ble-serial should contain sane defaults, so it is usable without configuration as well, ideally only requiring a device ID. The config file could then be specified with a optional --config PATH parameter.

For automated connections I think anyone can write a small script (at least on Linux) if required. This is more a topic for distro specific packaging, not necessarily for the tool itself. For example pip can't properly install system services etc. (outside site-packages). We could add a example in the readme or wiki though. About Windows: AFAIK the pty.openpty()/os.openpty() functions used for the serial work only on Linux, so there is no Windows support in sight. I am not really into Windows anyway, that makes it low priority for me. But I would be happy to support it, if it does not require huge changes. Then I would take the same approach as with Linux, providing a example/service setup in the documentation.

Jakeler commented 3 years ago

As far as I am aware ble-serial includes now all parameters that bleak exposes. Do you see anything else left? @AGlass0fMilk Connection interval seems to be not available though (https://github.com/hbldh/bleak/issues/149).

I have made script to automate connections: https://github.com/Jakeler/ble-serial/blob/master/helper/ble-autoconnect.py It reads a INI config file, for example: https://github.com/Jakeler/ble-serial/blob/master/helper/autoconnect.ini The config keys get directly transformed to long options, so mtu = 20 -> --mtu 20.