How to connect to a BLE device?

[ErikDK]

Dear Rolf,

i dont know Visual C well. I know LabView well.

Cheers

Erik

[lolasue]

Hi All,

I'm hoping that by this stage there will have been further developments by VI on this topic. I am a PhD researcher and I have a BLE broadcom device on a pcb, reading temperature sensors. The BLE device communicates with a BLE scanner app on my android phone but the voltage readings are only displayed in ASCII one at a time. I need to get this data into Labview 14 where I can perform signal analysis. My pc is Windows 7 (i can get access to a Windows 10)  to which I will need to connect a Bluetooth dongle. Do I have to create a Bluetooth script (VI) to communicate and pair with device? or Can I do this directly from DAQ VI? And finally is Labview yet able to connect with BLE? I am such a novice at this I dont really know where to start. As has been mentioned by previous posters, there is not much out there about this problem. I have done basic daq in Labview, in the past, direct from Agilent etc but this problem has me stumped. 

[rolfk]

DAQ won't help you with Bluetooth devices, unless they have also an anlog input and or output that you can connect to your DAQ IO. Bluetooth has and still is a rather isolated use cause on desktop computers, while totally accepted and used in widespread on smart phones and to a lesser degree tablets. As such the need to integrate bluetooth in a generic fashion into LabVIEW has been so far very small and therefore very little effort has been put into this by both NI and the community.

The first versions of bluetooth were also pretty non-standardized with several competing standards how to integrate it into a system. Eventually Microsoft created a standard that allowed direct access through an API and also access through the WinSock network stack interface. This last one was what LabVIEW implemented as at that time it seemed the most likely standard to be cross platform usable (LabVIEW does not only run under Windows but also Linux and Mac OSX). Unforntunately that API wasn't to well supported by the various bluetooth manufactoreres so that use of it with a particular bluetooth device or dongle was a hit and miss experience.

Then there came BLE. A completely different kind of bluetooth interface in fact and with a completely different API. Theoretically the BLE interface should also be able to be accessed from the WinSock provider. In practice I haven't seen that working with any interface ever. Add to that that Microsoft does not have any support for BLE for Window 7 and 8. Only 8.1 sort of supports a little BLE and Windows 10 supposedly supports it fully, but I still have to see people actually using that successfully.

The fact out there is that most Windows applications using Bluetooth and especially BLE still come with their own drivers that work with a specific set of bluetooth adapters and nothing else. The time of universal driver access to any kind of bluetooth dongle still hasn't arrived.

[Blokk]

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@suzanneocallaghan wrote:

Hi All,

I'm hoping that by this stage there will have been further developments by VI on this topic. I am a PhD researcher and I have a BLE broadcom device on a pcb, reading temperature sensors. The BLE device communicates with a BLE scanner app on my android phone but the voltage readings are only displayed in ASCII one at a time. I need to get this data into Labview 14 where I can perform signal analysis. My pc is Windows 7 (i can get access to a Windows 10)  to which I will need to connect a Bluetooth dongle. Do I have to create a Bluetooth script (VI) to communicate and pair with device? or Can I do this directly from DAQ VI? And finally is Labview yet able to connect with BLE? I am such a novice at this I dont really know where to start. As has been mentioned by previous posters, there is not much out there about this problem. I have done basic daq in Labview, in the past, direct from Agilent etc but this problem has me stumped. 

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I can only think of some workaround to manage a communication between LV and your "BLE broadcom device". I have 3 questions first of all:

1. "BLE broadcom device on a pcb": please could you specify the exact model number of this device? Also, how many temperature channels you wanna read?
2. "BLE scanner app on my android phone": please specify the Android application (also version).
3. "but the voltage readings are only displayed in ASCII one at a time": You mean your Android application can only show you one sensor value at a time, not all channels?

I have found some info regarding to Broadcom Bluetooth products, but I have no idea now how much effort it would involve to write your own driver which you could use on Windows and call from LabVIEW (i am not familiar in this field lets say...) :

https://community.broadcom.com/community/wiced-smart

https://www.broadcom.com/support/bluetooth

[lolasue]

Hi Blokk,

Answers to questions as follows:

1. "BLE broadcom device on a pcb": please could you specify the exact model number of this device? Also, how many temperature channels you wanna read? http://www.mouser.ie/ProductDetail/Broadcom/BCM20737S/?qs=7z%252bmIopC6%2FJMEo6ZMudE7w%3D%3D.  I have 5 temperature channels to read.
2. "BLE scanner app on my android phone": please specify the Android application (also version). BLE Scanner Version 3.3.  
3. "but the voltage readings are only displayed in ASCII one at a time": You mean your Android application can only show you one sensor value at a time, not all channels? The application shows only one channel at a time. When it reads A1 257, this tells me its from sensor 1 2.57V. A2......

I have just now purchased 1 x Bluefruit LE Friend - Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 4.0) - nRF51822 (v2.0). I think this may provide a solution to the problem as 'this USB-to-BLE board makes it easy to get your computer talking to your BLE enabled phone or tablet using a standard serial/UART connection. It has a full BLE peripheral stack and interface software so that you can treat your BLE connection just like a UART connection. Using Bluefruit LE friend, you can be up and running in under an hour on just about anything with a USB port, with easy migration across platforms and operating systems.To use, simply plug into your pc and flip the switch to either UART mode or CoMmanD mode.'

Do you think Labview will communicate with this device Blokk?

[Blokk]

I cannot check the Broadcom website, it is down. I will look at it later again...