Fuse Bluetooth

Description

This plugin lets you connect to bluetooth peripherals from Fuse. It is an extension of the Evothings BLE Cordova plugin.

Demo

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Limitations

• Only works on iOS for now (most of the work to make it work on Android lives in the fuse-cordova-bridge)
• Some of the APIs exposed by the Bluetooth native module are slightly different from those on the original plugin:
  • Instead of accepting device handle or DeviceInfo objects, this plugin only accepts the handles
  • Write operations (writeCharacteristic, writeCharacteristicWithoutResponse, writeDescriptor) accept a base64-encoded string as the data parameter

Usage

You can use the included example project as an example, but the steps are:

• Add reference to this project in your .unoproj file, e.g.:

"Projects": [
  "../fuse-bluetooth/fuse-bluetooth.unoproj"
],

• Add reference to the fuse-cordova-bridge project in your .unoproj file, e.g.:

"Projects": [
  "../fuse-cordova-bridge/fuse-cordova-bridge.unoproj"
],

• Within your project, create a cordova project to house the evothings/cordova-ble plugin that this project depends upon

cordova create cordova-plugins
cd cordova-plugins

• In that cordova project, add the plugin

cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-ble@2.0.1

• Add platform target (currently, the bridge only supports iOS)

cordova platform add ios

• Prepare the cordova project

cordova prepare

• Add references to the EVOBLE.h and EVOBLE.m files in your .unoproj file, e.g.:

"Includes": [
  "cordova-plugins/plugins/cordova-plugin-ble/src/ios/EVOBLE.h:ObjCHeader:iOS",
  "cordova-plugins/plugins/cordova-plugin-ble/src/ios/EVOBLE.m:ObjCSource:iOS",
  ...
]

Building your project

The biggest change to the build process for a project that uses the bridge is to link the CordovaLib. To do that:

• Add -ObjC to 'Other linker flags' in Build Settings. Why? Cordova seems to need it to add the cdv_JSONStringmethod to the NSArray implementation. From the docs:

This flag causes the linker to load every object file in the library that defines an Objective-C class or category. While this option will typically result in a larger executable (due to additional object code loaded into the application), it will allow the successful creation of effective Objective-C static libraries that contain categories on existing classes.

• Link libCordova.a
  • Select project
  • Build Phases tab
  • Link Binaries With Libraries
  • Add items (the plus sign on the bottom of the panel)
  • Add Other
  • Select CordovaLib.xcodeproj (under cordova-plugins/platforms/ios/CordovaLib/)
  • Add items (again)
  • Select libCordova.a
• Add CordovaLib as target
  • Build Phases tab
  • Target Dependencies
  • Add items
  • Select CordovaLib
• Be sure to enable 'Uses Bluetooth LE accessories' on the Capabilities tab -> Background Modes
• When you build with Fuse, you'll an error regarding CBCentralManagerScanOptionAllowDuplicatesKey not being resolved, just ignore it. The error is benign.