ESP32 BLE support

[Marc12O]

Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V3 board, the latest V3.1 board, has no discoverable Bluetooth, with RNode firmware 1.72

On my phone, when trying to add a BT device and pair it, nothing shows up, I did activate BT with rnodeconf -b and -p

Other boards like TTGO work fine

The rest of functionality works fine, e.g. USB connection, LoRa :-)

Thank you for RNode!

[jacobeva]

From looking at our codebase currently, it looks to me that this board uses BLE, but there is no driver written for it yet on ESP32 platforms.

[jacobeva]

As of current I do not possess any of these boards, or any ESP32 device which has BLE capability. You are welcome to attempt the implementation of this feature yourself (and I will provide you direction). If not, a hardware donation would allow me to implement it when I have time :)

[Marc12O]

Thank you!

[jacobeva]

A board is on its way to me, @Marc12O is aware of this.

[jacobeva]

The board arrived a couple days ago. Development will begin when I have time.

[jacobeva]

Progress is being made on this front, I have just managed to get a basic connection working over BLE to my computer. Now to iron out bugs and get serial working properly...

[jacobeva]

My changes have been pushed to the esp32-ble branch on this repo. For anyone who may have time, testing would be appreciated. Currently there's a crash which occurs after some time when receiving / sending packets, probably memory related. Also, the throughput is bottlenecked by BLE quite heavily, I will work on that also.

https://github.com/liberatedsystems/RNode_Firmware_CE/tree/esp32-ble

[macvenez]

Hi, I'm trying to enable ble, I checked out this branch, compiled and uploaded it (thanks to your help in the other discussion :-) ), anyway when the device boots up I start scanning from my phone and nothing shows up as bluetooth device. Do I have to enable it from the device somewhere?
Still thanks for these sunday tests

[jacobeva]

rnodeconf -b /dev/ttyUSB0 to enable bluetooth :)

[jacobeva]

You need to run rnodeconf -p /dev/ttyUSB0 in order to enable pairing also.

[macvenez]

Thanks, that worked on the device and I managed to connect it.
The issue now is I can't connect to the rnode device from the sideband app on Android.
The device is successfully paired but it won't connect to the phone (and app) when starting sideband, it says "starting rnode" but the device then doesn't connect...

EDIT: I followed this guide from unsigned.io if it may help

[jacobeva]

Sideband doesn't support BLE yet. That is actively being worked on.

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On 2 September 2024 09:21:41 BST, Marco Veneziano ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks, that worked on the device and I managed to connect it. The issue now is I can't connect to the rnode device from the sideband app on Android. The device is successfully paired but it won't connect to the phone (and app) when starting sideband, it says "starting rnode" but the device then doesn't connect... -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #8 (comment) You are receiving this because you were assigned. Message ID: ***@***.***>

[macvenez]

Alright, that's what I was missing then, thanks!
How are you testing ble connectivity?

[jacobeva]

Using `ble-serial` on my desktop, currently :)

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On 24/09/02 01:50am, Marco Veneziano wrote: Alright, that's what I was missing then, thanks! How are you testing ble connectivity? -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #8 (comment) You are receiving this because you were assigned. Message ID: ***@***.***>

[jacobeva]

Mark actually beat me to it on this one, see here. This will be merged into the CE repo soon.