6 ms·

> This isn't the first time I've talked on this. I've had some experience with bluetooth on Linux, and as a radio guy. The answer is there are problems from Lay

> This isn't the first time I've talked on this. I've had some experience with bluetooth on Linux, and as a radio guy. The answer is there are problems from Layer 1 to Layer 7, needless complexity, and design by committee. I'll add on to this a bit. The Bluetooth stacks out there are, in general, tested only for a few of the many profiles BT supports. The firmware running on the BT chips is always of questionable quality, it is a black box, that in the case of one major chip vendor, is not coded using source control(!), figured out empirically as we'd get firmware drops that had fixed out latest reported issue, but bugs from previous FW drops would be present again. (Maybe they did use source control, and just had the world's worst regression test suite, e.g. none?) That is device side. On the PC/Phone side, things are exactly the same. EVERY phone has problems with their Bluetooth stack. The Android Bluetooth stack introduces new bugs in between major revisions So does the iPhone BT stack. The iPhone BT stack had a problem for, I believe it was 3 major OS revisions, where it would just drop connections to BTLE devices, and users had to turn BT on and off on the phone to reconnect. It was reported to Apple by multiple vendors, it took multiple years for a fix to come out, and it made BTLE on iPhone a horrible experience. But similarly severe bugs exist everywhere. HID is the one profile that will work. Serial also probably works, more or less, but serial you have to build a lot of other infrastructure on top of it. BT pairing on phones works nowadays, thanks in part to the popularity of wearable devices, but it barely functioned 5 years ago. Other specs, including simple ones like media control (AVRCP, which is an awesome spec by the way, give it a read), will have differences in implementation between OSs (desktop and mobile), typically some basic features are not implemented for who knows what reason. All that said, BTLE is incredibly simple and easy to understand. :)

floatboth 9y ago
> BT pairing on phones works nowadays, thanks in part to the popularity of wearable devices, but it barely functioned 5 years ago Huh? Pairing worked like 10 years ago. And sending files between phones. Everyone in school was sending J2ME games/apps around :D Audio with media control also worked. And modem (using the phone's GPRS/EDGE connection on a PC).
- 80211 9y ago
  All due respect, it does work much better today than it did 5 years ago. Many things now "just work" and it used to be more fiddly.
- mtalantikite 9y ago
  I don't know, just last week I was having issues pairing my iPhone 7 to my friend's new Jeep and ended up giving up. I usually just keep bluetooth turned off on my phone and don't buy bluetooth devices since I find it's often more frustrating than not.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    >just last week I was having issues pairing my iPhone 7 to my friend's new Jeep and ended up giving up for audio, right?
    - malgorithms 9y ago
      TL;DR: Remove old paired devices! I just went through this this week with a 2013 Wrangler. Here's what fixed it for me: deleting the other bluetooth devices from the radio. It had my old iPhone and my brother's iPhone. Neither was anywhere nearby, but when I tried to pair with my new iPhone, it wouldn't work. I tried multiple times over multiple days. Finally, as a test I just removed the other 2 phones from the profile. It paired perfectly after that and has worked since.
      - 13of40 9y ago
        Any suggestions for pairing a OnePlus 3 with a (2016) BMW for audio? Mine works like a champ for speaker phone but in order to play any kind of media, the OnePlus refuses to do it. (Though my son's Samsung Galaxy S5 works.)
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Same experiences. I don't even bother trying blutooth anything anymore. It's more frustration than it's worth. It's disabled on all my devices.
mistermann 9y ago
Is there any reason to hope things might be finally resolved in the somewhat near future?
- com2kid 9y ago
  I'm not sure, I'm no longer working on products that use BlueTooth. I know that BT pairing has gotten easier and easier over time (improvements to the spec), but the real important parts are the BT stacks and BT chip firmware. From what I understand working with BT Engineers, the best BT stack was from Stonestreet One, who was recently bought up by Qualcomm. If someone had bought them up and open sourced their code, the world of BT would be a much better place right now.
- moonbug22 9y ago
  Based on 16 years of the technology never failing to disappoint, none whatsoever.
  - wott 9y ago
    Well, after 20 years, USB (another specification which aims at making a hundred kinds of different coffees, like about every specification designed in the last 20 years) kind of works nowadays, so there might be a bit of hope. Hmmm wait, except twice a week when I plug USB devices in the 'wrong' order on my computer. Oh well...
    - fragmede 9y ago
      On the bleeding edge, the future with reversible connectors is here, with USB-C style connectors (on both ends!) for everything. 'course, now there's a hundred dollars in various adaptors to rebuy...
sAuronas 9y ago
Serial has its issues too. We are using a serial port over BTLE and when you need to do anything with debuffering/buffering and online data... you no longer have a UI because the transmission is so slow.
weaksauce 9y ago
> that in the case of one major chip vendor, is not coded using source control(!), In this day and age it's absolutely insane to not have revision control.
- dan15 9y ago
  I was using SVN for my personal projects 10+ years ago. It's crazy to think that some companies may not be using source control even today...
  - lostapathy 9y ago
    They're definitely out there. Even in places that think they do, it seems pretty common to have an additional codebase in the database without any real version control. I'd like to know how problems like this correlate to data breaches.
  - jermaustin1 9y ago
    I worked for a client years ago, Dropbox was source control. It wasn't as bad as none, but you lost changes at the 30 day mark.
    - OJFord 9y ago
      Were the (technical) employees happy about it? I.e. was it just a crazy requirement handed down, or did they not know better? I just can't imagine it even for solo development, nevermind collaborative work! "Agh. We must have had a merge conflict, damn, the core part of my work is gone... Let me see if I have a recent copy... Oop, no, I don't, because I've run out of disk space from all these clone backups."
      - gradys 9y ago
        FWIW, I use git inside Dropbox for my personal solo projects. I don't want to have to use commits and git's remote syncing mechanisms to share in-progress code between my desktop at home and my laptop. I want to be able to pick up exactly where I was on the other machine, including my git staging area and local unstaged changes. It works perfectly for this. I do occasionally get Dropbox-level merge conflicts for tmp editor/IDE files, but I can't recall getting any for source files.
itsniper 9y ago
Some very insightful discussion! I work with BLE at the software level on iOS and ever since iOS 8 it has been pretty stable, iOS 6 was terrible. However, it does seem to be quite flaky at times (interference, cheap BT chip, etc). I've been doing iOS development for wearables for a few years and have found that you can generally make BLE for an iOS app very reliable. But it requires some work in the software to cover up some of the underlying flakiness. Reminds me a lot of building resilient networking code for apps back when cell service was slow and spotty. But if you do a little work to build in command queues, auto-reconnect, etc it can be very solid for the user. Oh, and it helps a lot to pick a good chip. From my experience, the Nordic NRF5x series is the best. But as has been mentioned elsewhere in this post you still need to have a quality antenna design. I've noticed a huge difference between using a reference design and one that spends some time in a chamber with a good RF engineer.
mondoshawan 9y ago
The biggest problem we have on the Android side of things is the steaming pile that is Broadcom's bluedroid. The codebase does its own allocation tracking, threading, scheduling, and has state machines with call ins, outs, and backs (none of them used the same way). In my time on Glass, bluedroid was one of the biggest headaches we had with Bluetooth, not to mention the Bluetooth chip firmware. We tried to clean up as much as we could (and did a fair amount) bit the stack truly needs a rewrite from scratch. Some things you just can't incrementally fix -- especially when new features are continually dropped into the codebase from afar, without regard to the damage they do to the codebase.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  Some things you just can't incrementally fix -- especially when new features are continually dropped in from afar, It is the new features here that are the problem. I think you actually can incrementally fix anything, but such a project can be as expensive as a rewrite -- and neither will succeed if new stuff is constantly being thrown in.

floatboth 9y ago

> BT pairing on phones works nowadays, thanks in part to the popularity of wearable devices, but it barely functioned 5 years ago Huh? Pairing worked like 10 years ago. And sending files between phones. Everyone in school was sending J2ME games/apps around :D Audio with media control also worked. And modem (using the phone's GPRS/EDGE connection on a PC).

80211 9y ago
All due respect, it does work much better today than it did 5 years ago. Many things now "just work" and it used to be more fiddly.
mtalantikite 9y ago
I don't know, just last week I was having issues pairing my iPhone 7 to my friend's new Jeep and ended up giving up. I usually just keep bluetooth turned off on my phone and don't buy bluetooth devices since I find it's often more frustrating than not.
- logicallee 9y ago
  >just last week I was having issues pairing my iPhone 7 to my friend's new Jeep and ended up giving up for audio, right?
  - malgorithms 9y ago
    TL;DR: Remove old paired devices! I just went through this this week with a 2013 Wrangler. Here's what fixed it for me: deleting the other bluetooth devices from the radio. It had my old iPhone and my brother's iPhone. Neither was anywhere nearby, but when I tried to pair with my new iPhone, it wouldn't work. I tried multiple times over multiple days. Finally, as a test I just removed the other 2 phones from the profile. It paired perfectly after that and has worked since.
    - 13of40 9y ago
      Any suggestions for pairing a OnePlus 3 with a (2016) BMW for audio? Mine works like a champ for speaker phone but in order to play any kind of media, the OnePlus refuses to do it. (Though my son's Samsung Galaxy S5 works.)
- ams6110 9y ago
  Same experiences. I don't even bother trying blutooth anything anymore. It's more frustration than it's worth. It's disabled on all my devices.

mistermann 9y ago

Is there any reason to hope things might be finally resolved in the somewhat near future?

com2kid 9y ago
I'm not sure, I'm no longer working on products that use BlueTooth. I know that BT pairing has gotten easier and easier over time (improvements to the spec), but the real important parts are the BT stacks and BT chip firmware. From what I understand working with BT Engineers, the best BT stack was from Stonestreet One, who was recently bought up by Qualcomm. If someone had bought them up and open sourced their code, the world of BT would be a much better place right now.
moonbug22 9y ago
Based on 16 years of the technology never failing to disappoint, none whatsoever.
- wott 9y ago
  Well, after 20 years, USB (another specification which aims at making a hundred kinds of different coffees, like about every specification designed in the last 20 years) kind of works nowadays, so there might be a bit of hope. Hmmm wait, except twice a week when I plug USB devices in the 'wrong' order on my computer. Oh well...
  - fragmede 9y ago
    On the bleeding edge, the future with reversible connectors is here, with USB-C style connectors (on both ends!) for everything. 'course, now there's a hundred dollars in various adaptors to rebuy...

sAuronas 9y ago

Serial has its issues too. We are using a serial port over BTLE and when you need to do anything with debuffering/buffering and online data... you no longer have a UI because the transmission is so slow.

weaksauce 9y ago

> that in the case of one major chip vendor, is not coded using source control(!), In this day and age it's absolutely insane to not have revision control.

dan15 9y ago
I was using SVN for my personal projects 10+ years ago. It's crazy to think that some companies may not be using source control even today...
- lostapathy 9y ago
  They're definitely out there. Even in places that think they do, it seems pretty common to have an additional codebase in the database without any real version control. I'd like to know how problems like this correlate to data breaches.
- jermaustin1 9y ago
  I worked for a client years ago, Dropbox was source control. It wasn't as bad as none, but you lost changes at the 30 day mark.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    Were the (technical) employees happy about it? I.e. was it just a crazy requirement handed down, or did they not know better? I just can't imagine it even for solo development, nevermind collaborative work! "Agh. We must have had a merge conflict, damn, the core part of my work is gone... Let me see if I have a recent copy... Oop, no, I don't, because I've run out of disk space from all these clone backups."
    - gradys 9y ago
      FWIW, I use git inside Dropbox for my personal solo projects. I don't want to have to use commits and git's remote syncing mechanisms to share in-progress code between my desktop at home and my laptop. I want to be able to pick up exactly where I was on the other machine, including my git staging area and local unstaged changes. It works perfectly for this. I do occasionally get Dropbox-level merge conflicts for tmp editor/IDE files, but I can't recall getting any for source files.

itsniper 9y ago

Some very insightful discussion! I work with BLE at the software level on iOS and ever since iOS 8 it has been pretty stable, iOS 6 was terrible. However, it does seem to be quite flaky at times (interference, cheap BT chip, etc). I've been doing iOS development for wearables for a few years and have found that you can generally make BLE for an iOS app very reliable. But it requires some work in the software to cover up some of the underlying flakiness. Reminds me a lot of building resilient networking code for apps back when cell service was slow and spotty. But if you do a little work to build in command queues, auto-reconnect, etc it can be very solid for the user. Oh, and it helps a lot to pick a good chip. From my experience, the Nordic NRF5x series is the best. But as has been mentioned elsewhere in this post you still need to have a quality antenna design. I've noticed a huge difference between using a reference design and one that spends some time in a chamber with a good RF engineer.

mondoshawan 9y ago

The biggest problem we have on the Android side of things is the steaming pile that is Broadcom's bluedroid. The codebase does its own allocation tracking, threading, scheduling, and has state machines with call ins, outs, and backs (none of them used the same way). In my time on Glass, bluedroid was one of the biggest headaches we had with Bluetooth, not to mention the Bluetooth chip firmware. We tried to clean up as much as we could (and did a fair amount) bit the stack truly needs a rewrite from scratch. Some things you just can't incrementally fix -- especially when new features are continually dropped into the codebase from afar, without regard to the damage they do to the codebase.

adrianratnapala 9y ago
Some things you just can't incrementally fix -- especially when new features are continually dropped in from afar, It is the new features here that are the problem. I think you actually can incrementally fix anything, but such a project can be as expensive as a rewrite -- and neither will succeed if new stuff is constantly being thrown in.