3 ms·

One thing about bluetooth and phones that I really wish that apple/google/bluetooth group could resolve is a way for a device to advertise that it needs attenti

One thing about bluetooth and phones that I really wish that apple/google/bluetooth group could resolve is a way for a device to advertise that it needs attention and then bubble that up to the nearest phone that is registered for that Service UUID. The blog illustrates the feature of scanning bluetooth devices around you and pushing data to the cloud when needed, but right now that background scan is really not optimal for both ios and android. Android requires a manual scan process every 15 minutes or so based on background task intervals, and iOS only alerts you to ble scans when you turn on the screen of your phone. Android will cause you to burn battery constantly checking on devices, but iOS will cause you to miss them entirely unless you unlock your phone alot. Right now we have a simple use case of updating the clocks on our devices that would be a whole lot easier if the devices could simply advertise they need attention after XX hours, and that ran a background service for our app to do it when needed, and avoid the whole periodic scanning.

HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
I haven't touched BLE in a while, so maybe I don't understand exactly what you're looking for. But I think it can be done by having the devices change their advertising data to indicate that they need service. The background service could listen (passively, no scan needed) to advertising data and only after it sees that a device needs to be updated, connect to it and do the update. Putting "live" data into the advertising packet used to be a way for BLE fitness devices to be active in a Group Fitness environment where scanning and connecting to 30+ devices is not feasible. I think that BLE 5 has a better way of doing that now.
- jononor 1y ago
  Yep, the advertising packets can be used for things like this. And frequently are in IoT settings. Typically by using the AD type Manufacturer Specific (0xFF). BLE 5.x makes it possible to have many more bytes of advertisement data, including longer packets and chains of packets. Otherwise the mechanisms stayed the same as in 4.x. Which is good, as BLE 4.x only hardware/software is still around...
- deleted 1y ago
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HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago

I haven't touched BLE in a while, so maybe I don't understand exactly what you're looking for. But I think it can be done by having the devices change their advertising data to indicate that they need service. The background service could listen (passively, no scan needed) to advertising data and only after it sees that a device needs to be updated, connect to it and do the update. Putting "live" data into the advertising packet used to be a way for BLE fitness devices to be active in a Group Fitness environment where scanning and connecting to 30+ devices is not feasible. I think that BLE 5 has a better way of doing that now.

jononor 1y ago
Yep, the advertising packets can be used for things like this. And frequently are in IoT settings. Typically by using the AD type Manufacturer Specific (0xFF). BLE 5.x makes it possible to have many more bytes of advertisement data, including longer packets and chains of packets. Otherwise the mechanisms stayed the same as in 4.x. Which is good, as BLE 4.x only hardware/software is still around...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]