Can I use this crate to interact with Bluez?

[wpd]

I am new to Rust, to Bluetooth, to bluez, and to D-Bus, but I figured I might as well jump in with both feet to all of this.

I see at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc/advertising-api.txt what is described as the "BlueZ D-Bus LE Advertising API Description", So I tried:

$ cargo install dbus-codegen
$ dbus-codegen-rust -s -d org.bluez -p "/org/bluez" > bluez.rs

... but I don't see any code generated for the org.bluez.LEAdvertisement1 interface I was thinking I would be able to use after generating this code.

If it isn't obvious, I am clearly clueless.. can anybody offer me some help to de-clueless-ify myself.

Thanks.

--wpd

[diwic]

Since you're new to all of this, first install a D-Bus introspection tool such as D-feet and start it.
Find the org.bluez destination. Now you need to find a path that implements org.bluez.LEAdvertisement1. If you find nothing, connect the something that you want to talk to, restart D-Bus and retry.

Now that you have found the path that implements org.bluez.LEAdvertisement1, that's the path you should have after the -p switch when calling dbus-codegen.

[wpd]

Thank you very much. Even learning about D-feet is a great step forward for me. Unsurprisingly, when I run it, I see the same 2 interfaces found by your code. I was thinking that, since the API was defined by Bluez, that Bluez would implement that API. It certainly seems to me (from interacting with the command line utilities) that I must be able to send messages to the LEDAdvertisement1 interface. I guess I need to learn more now. Thanks for the help.

[wpd]

I just realized that the bluetooth device exposed by my MacOS host (via Parallels) to my Ubuntu VM wasn't as full featured as I thought. When I plugged a Bluetooth USB dongle into my Mac and directed that it should be attached to my VM, I was able to see all of the interfaces I was expecting.

Again, thanks for the help. I have some small hope (but very little expectation) that I might learn enough Rust, Bluetooth, D-Bus, and bluez to help out with this project (as you have requested). We'll see how/if that comes to pass.

--wpd

[Spferical]

(Chiming in because I've gone through the process of figuring out the bluez advertising api.) To send advertisements that other bluetooth devices can see, you're supposed to expose your own dbus object that implements the org.bluez.LEAdvertisement1 interface, then register it by calling the org.bluez.LEAdvertisingManager1 interface. When you register it, bluez will itself call methods on your object before returning success. For example, the bluster crate registers an advertisement here.

Alternatively, if you want to see names and other info from other devices' advertisements (and perhaps connect to them), I believe you want [bluez's device api](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc/device-api. Using sudo busctl monitor to report what's happening while tools like bluetoothctl talk to bluez can be helpful to see an example of how this stuff works and also debug.

[wpd]

Thank you. That's incredibly helpful, especially the link to bluster.

--wpd