bluez-helper

This is a command-line interface to the BlueZ protocol stack for Linux. The resulting program (bluez-helper) is used by the macchina.io EDGE BtLE protocol implementation to interface with the BlueZ stack.

While the main purpose of bluez-helper is to be used by BtLE, sending commands and reading responses, it can also be used interactively to explore peripheral devices.

For a list of available commands, run bluez-helper and enter the help command.

Prerequisites

This program requires a Linux system with glib-2.0 and pkg-config installed, as well as GNU Make and GCC. To install the prerequisites on Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libglib2.0-dev

Building

$ make

Installing

It's recommended to copy the resulting file to /usr/local/bin. Note that bluez-helper requires certain capabilities to access the BlueZ stack. If you don't want to run the program as root, run the following commands to assign the required capabilities to bluez-helper:

$ sudo setcap 'cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin+eip' bluez-helper

You can do the installation steps, including setting the capabilities, with:

$ sudo make install

Acknowledgements

This project uses source code from the bluez project, which is made available under Version 2 of the GNU Public License. See file COPYING in the bluez directory for the full text of this license.

Furthermore, this project includes code (bluepy-helper.c) from the bluepy project by Ian Harvey, which is a derivative work of BlueZ and therefore also licensed under Version 2 of the GNU Public License.

License

The source code in the project is licensed under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License Version 2, the text of which can be found in bluez/COPYING.