beetle

Beetle

Beetle is an operating system service that mediates access between applications and Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals using GATT (Generic Attribute Profile), the application-level protocol of Bluetooth Low Energy. While GATT was designed for low-power personal area networks, its connection-oriented interface, naming hierarchy, and transactional semantics give sufficient structure for an OS to manage and understand application behavior and properly manage access to peripherals without needing to understand device specific functionality.

Building and Running

Beetle is built for Linux kernels compiled with the Bluez subsystem (most desktop distributions, but not, for example, Andorid). The only compile-time dependency is a recent Go compiler. There are no specific runtime dependencies, but you need a way to turn on your Bluetooth controller and scan for peripherals, so the Bluez userland tools (specifically hciconfig and hcitool are useul).

$ cd PATH_TO_BEETLE_SOURCE
$ go build main.go
$ ./main

Next ensure your Bluetooth controller is powered on and scan for your peripherals:

$ sudo hciconfig hci0 up
$ sudo hcitool lescan

Running Beetle presents a shell interface with several commands. The following is an example session that connects to two BLE peripheral devices and allows them to interact with each other:

$ ./main
> connect random [DEVICE1_ADDRESS]
Connecting to [DEVICE1_ADDRESS]
> connect random [DEVICE2_ADDRESS]
Connecting to [DEVICE2_ADDRESS]
> serve 0 1
> serve 1 0
> start 0
> start 1

Commands