Work in Progress

Boxee is a Bluetooth Low Energy automation protoype for the Raspberyy PI. It relies on Dbus and Bluez to expose GPIO control over the BLE, so that one can control GPIOs over the phone. The testing application on IOS is LightBlue

Creates a Bluetooth LE advertisement and publishes one service, which enables to set GPIO 17 and 18 to HIGH and LOW on a Raspberry PI, by writing a 2 byte value array:

• 0x00 0x00 => PIN 17 and 18 is LOW
• 0x00 0xFF => PIN 17 is LOW, PIN 18 is HIGH
• 0xFF 0xFF => PIN 17 and 18 are HIGH

• The logging is made in syslog, some text is still printed on the standard ouput
• Tested with RPI2

• only GPIO 17 and 18 are initialized and controllable, however this limitation can be easily overcome by adding more channels in the BoxeeServer constructor (out_chs = [17, 18, xx, xx])
• sometimes the LE Advertisement is restarted only 15 seconds after the connection was removed (bluez problem?)
• there's no notification or read support, however the complete infrastructure implementation is finished
• the GATT server and the LE adverstisement are marked to be experimental features in the Bluez stack
• there's no security whatsoever (anybody can send low or high requests to the GPIO interfaces)

• the ERROR level is not logged in the syslog for some reason
• the LE Advertisement is not removed for some reason, once the server is shut down (bluez problem?)
• there are still some methods printing to the standard output some debug data
• the company data within the advertisement packages is not yet configurable from the Boxee Server

• The Boxee server is based on the most recent bluez 5.34
• Python 2.x
• Systemd is required for the bluez initialization (soft bluez requirement, it can be overcome by --disable-systemd configuration directive on bluez)

The best done via dbus-monitor. First one needs to configure the Dbus in a way that can have an eye on every command/signal on the bus

cat /etc/dbus-1/system-local.conf

<!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC
"-//freedesktop//DTD D-Bus Bus Configuration 1.0//EN"
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
<busconfig>
    <policy user="root">
        <allow eavesdrop="true"/>
        <allow eavesdrop="true" send_destination="*"/>
    </policy>
</busconfig>

Then: dbus-monitor --system --monitor

sudo apt-get install tmux libusb-dev libdbus-1-dev libglib2.0-dev libudev-dev libreadline-dev libical0 libical-dev rfkill libnss-myhostname
sudo mkdir bluez
cd bluez

sudo wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/bluetooth/bluez-5.36.tar.gz
sudo tar xvf bluez-5.36.tar
cd bluez-5.36/
sudo rfkill unblock all

LDFLAGS=-lrt

sudo ./configure --enable-experimental --enable-maintainer-mode --enable-library --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --localstatedir=/var --enable-tools

sudo make
sudo make install

Then you need to edit /lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service and add -nE to the bluetoothd. This will enable to start the experimental features of the bluetooth daemon.

Create a link in: /etc/systemd/system

dbus-org.bluez.service -> /lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service

Than

systemctl --system daemon-reload
systemctl restart bluetooth.service

For low level happenings

btmon

• list known devices: 'devices'
• list all bluetooth controllers: 'list'
• show bluetooth controller details: 'show'

You can connect to BLE enbaled devices by using:

• if the bluetooth address is not public ..* hcitool lecc --random
• if the bluetooth address is public ..* hcitool lecc

Same goes with the gatttool:

• gatttool -t random -b -I or
• gatttool -b -I

One can check if the address is public or not by running hcidump -X and checking the address type while running hcitool lescan;

In case one have various connection errors you might try:

bluez*/tools/btmgmt pairable on
bluez*/tools/btmgmt le on

Also sometimes the connection error is due to

psutil module is used to send memory and CPU information

apt-get install python-psutil python3-psutil

• Good and general summary of GATT: https://learn.adafruit.com/introduction-to-bluetooth-low-energy/gatt
• GATT Profile hierarchy (official documentation): https://developer.bluetooth.org/TechnologyOverview/Pages/GATT.aspx
• Ibeacon definition: https://developer.mbed.org/blog/entry/BLE-Beacons-URIBeacon-AltBeacons-iBeacon/

• Very good general presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/yeokm1/introduction-to-bluetooth-low-energy

python /tmp/boxee/boxee.py -d
tail -fn 300 /var/log/syslog

And if you'd like to check the status of the database:

sqlite3 /tmp/boxee/boxee.db 
sqlite> select * from locker;