Bluetooth on BBBW and BBGW

[Stephane Charette]

Not familiar with Bluetooth. I own several BBBW and BBGW devices.  Is there a way to interconnect the devices using Bluetooth?

What would that mean -- does Bluetooth provide an IP address?  Is there an interface I can access from bash scripts?  An API from C/C++?

Thanks for pointers in the right direction, as I've obviously not played with Bluetooth before today.

Stéphane

[Robert Nelson]

Something like:

http://bluez.sourceforge.net/contrib/HOWTO-PAN

Regards,

--
Robert Nelson
https://rcn-ee.com/

[Stephane Charette]

> Not familiar with Bluetooth. I own several BBBW and BBGW devices.  Is there
> a way to interconnect the devices using Bluetooth?

... 

Something like:

http://bluez.sourceforge.net/contrib/HOWTO-PAN

Thanks, Robert, I will try that today.

Meanwhile, I'm curious to know, are there other ways to inter-connect Beaglebone wireless devices using Bluetooth?

I see some files in /etc/bluetooth which I'm about to Google to get an understanding of Bluetooth -- are there other Bluetooth-related files on the BB I should look into?

Stéphane

[Robert Nelson]

i also found:

https://www.linux.com/learn/weekend-project-personal-area-networking-bluetooth

debian's bluez and bluetooth packages are pre-installed on the image..

[ybea...@rehut.com]

There are a few ways to interconnect them with BT. It is easiest to describe
things in terms of profiles (and easier to search for).

- If you need just bare connectivity, i.e. the wireless equivalent of a serial
port, you can use SPP. (Serial Port Profile). In the BlueZ docs, this is done
by the rfcomm tool which can be controlled by a bash script. Once the link is
made, it is for most purposes a serial port.

- If you want IP connectivity, you can run PPP on top of the SPP stuff (this is
mostly the DUN profile without the AT commands). This is purely a point to
point link.

-As mentioned in the response, there is the PAN profile. This is almost
eithernet like.

It sounds like you are asking for general information but is there a specific
thing you want to do (share files, share small bits of info, etc)?

--
Hunyue Yau
http://www.hy-research.com/

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> What would that mean -- does Bluetooth provide an IP address? Is there an
> interface I can access from bash scripts? An API from C/C++?

As explained by Hunyue Yau, you'll need to layer something over
BlueTooth, either BNEP (PAN profile) or PPP (DUN profile).

But seriously -- don't. WiFi is both more spectrally efficient and more
reliable than BlueTooth, and the wireless chips used in the Beaglebones
support acting as an access point. Please do the proper thing -- set up
a WiFi network and be done with it.

-- Juliusz

[Stéphane Charette]

Not my call.  Customer wants to use Bluetooth to connect some tablets to the beaglebones.  Apparently when the tablets first connect to the BB over wifi, everything is fine, the application works.  But if they move too far away from the BB, the tablets automatically switch over to the corporate wifi, which has a stronger signal than the BB, and they don't switch back.  Once it switches to the corporate wifi, they lose access to the BB, and their custom application no longer works.

Stéphane