BLE Scanner

A command line utility for Bluetooth LE scanning on Linux / BlueZ

Compiling

1. Install prerequisites

sudo apt-get install libbluetooth-dev

2. Compile the program

cc scanner.c -lbluetooth -o scanner

Running

Run the program like this:

./scanner

Each time it detects a Bluetooth LE advertisement it prints out the MAC address of the advertisting device, the RSSI and the bytes of the advertisement like this:

B8:27:EB:1F:93:4D -68 02 01 06 11 06 82 75 25 D9 37 9D D7 8F 5F 4A F4 20 00 00 75 30
71:5C:23:9D:BC:7F -68 02 01 1A 02 0A 0C 0B FF 4C 00 10 06 03 1A 3B D4 B2 EB
B8:27:EB:1F:93:4D -68 02 01 06 11 06 82 75 25 D9 37 9D D7 8F 5F 4A F4 20 00 00 75 30

In the first line above, B8:27:EB:1F:93:4D is the hardware MAC address, -68 is the RSSI and the remaining values are the hex bytes of the advertisement.

The program will auto exit after one of two things happens: (a) 10 seconds pass with no detections. (b) 1000 advertisements are detected. It does this for the sake of stability. Rarely, the underlying bluetooth stack will crash. By exiting after 10 seconds it allows you to restart the program and get new detections. Running forever is actually less stable.

Need Help? Want to change this?

Feel free to open an Issue or submit a Pull Request on Github here: https://github.com/davidgyoung/ble-scanner

License

BSD 3

Credits

This program is based off of code by Damian Kołakowski here https://github.com/damian-kolakowski/intel-edison-playground/blob/master/scan.c