Bluetooth and Linux

[Christopher Schmidt]

At the meeting last night, I discovered that I am one of relatively few 
people who have had the oppourtunity to develop and play with 
communication between a bluetooth mobile device and a Linux machine.  
(at least in the subset of GNH which was at that meeting.) In 
case there are others of you out there who may have an interest in such 
things, I'm going to toss a few links out there. These are projects I 
either used or ran into while I was playing with my Nokia 3650, most of 
which I was doing about a year ago.

The "official" Bluetooth stack is "bluez", and is an option to be 
compiled into many newer kernels. Its homepage is available at 
http://www.bluez.org/ . This page didn't exist when I was looking into 
Bluetooth - much of my researching was "pulling myself up by the 
bootstraps" - reading a lot of documentation to get as far as I did. 
There are many Howtos as to how to set things up available at 
http://www.holtmann.org/linux/bluetooth/ (a page which only had a dozen 
or so links when I was last playing with it.)

Once you've got Bluetooth set up, there are some nifty projects you can 
use:

http://bemused.sourceforge.net/
A project which allows you to control your mp3 player via a simple 
interface on a Series 60 phone. This project uses the phone as a 
"client", which can issue commands like "skip forward", "skip 
backwards", "pause", etc. to a server which runs primarily on Windows, 
but also under Linux. I used this to control xmms or xine, both of which 
have simple command line ways of skipping to next track, etc. Currently, 
the interface is pretty heavily tied to a "track"-type program, because 
the commands are attached to the GUI in the phone. If anyone knows 
Sybmian, I expect that it would be possible to change this so that 
buttons on the phone could have more of an effect. 

http://openobex.sourceforge.net/
This is how I transferred files to the phone. Once you set up a serial 
connection to the phone, you can transfer files in this way. This may be 
superceded by the next project:

http://usefulinc.com/software/gnome-bluetooth/
Edd Dumbill's gnome-bluetooth packages are a way of integrating 
Bluetooth into the desktop. It mirrors a lot of funtionality of the 
phone directly to the computer: notification of incoming calls, files, 
SMS, and the like, as well as serving as a bluetooth file server and 
so on. This looks like a really nifty piece of software, although I 
don't have hardware to play with it on. I've seen some other things that 
Edd has done in the past, and they've always been impressive. (One 
project looked at devices around you in Bluetooth land, and told you if 
it could associate them to a person that you "knew" as described in RDF: 
however, the project never went anywhere other than a demo, afaik: looks 
like it was last touched back in February. Blog post is at 
http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/contents/2004/02/01-bluefoaf/read .)

That's just a roundup of some of the things I've come across when 
working in Linux+Bluetooth world. If any of you have any interest in 
playing with Bluetooth, I'd be happy to try it out - I have a powerbook 
with bluetooth, and somewhere in this house I have a bluetooth USB 
adapter that I need to find ;) In addition, I have a Nokia 3650, which 
tends to be a pretty popular model for applications (Although it doesn't 
support MIDP 2.0, which is needed for some Java stuff.)

I also use the Bluetooth on the Mac religiously: BluePhoneManager and 
Salling Clicker, combined with Apple's iSync are all incredible apps, 
and do everything I could think of doing. Almost makes me wish there was 
a scripting interface on Linux similar to apple script - where you can 
control just about anything pretty simply.

This post is getting long and rambly. So I'll stop.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
crschmidt at crschmidt.net
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