Using bluetooth BLE devices on OpenHAB

[eric]

Hello,

I've been looking for a way to add bluetooth devices to OpenHAB.  But I want way more than simply indicate "presence" of a BLE device.  It seems the existing Bluetooth binding is only for presence.

Is there a good bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter and linux utility out there that you can use to pair devices (like this bluetooth audio control button)?  I'm hoping the bluetooth utility let's you specify what happens when a paired devices button is pressed.  You can run a script to change the state of an OpenHAB item.

Has anyone gone this route with BLE?  Looking for the path of least resistance.

[Kai Kreuzer]

I am looking since a long time for a good BLE support. Unfortunately, this is tremendously difficult in Java, there is simply no standard way of accessing BLE dongles.

Note that someone tried a BLE binding for openHAB 2 already, see https://github.com/openhab/openhab2/pull/79. This comes with a native process that hooks into BlueZ on Linux and communicates through UDP with Java. Downside is that this binding it is not platform independent and that it requires a separate process. But I couldn't find any better solution yet myself...

So if anybody has a good idea - let us know!

Cheers,
Kai