Bluetooth Bracelet Update 1

Currently, the bracelet is able to scroll a message across, but the mechanism is crude, inflexible, and probably quite hard on battery on the bracelet’s side.  The reason is that while the display controller is probably able to scroll the screen (my guess – it seems to be a custom job, as there is no reference to it on the Internets), there is no reason to do so for the original application, so we have to do things the hard way.  If you take a look at the script I posted, you’ll see that what I’m doing is breaking up the string, sending a call notification with each chunk, and then canceling the notification after a certain interval.  The effect is a crude kind of scrolling.  What I would have like to do it to load some basic SPP firmware on the bracelet so that this could be done much more flexibly, and without kludges.  Here’s why I can’t.  (Or, to be fair, “here’s why it’s not worth the bother”)

The Bluetooth chip in the bracelet is an SoC from CSR, who makes some nice-looking wireless chipsets.  Or at least, the high-level block diagram looks nice – because that’s all I can get access to.  First, I tried to look up my part number to see which model I have.  This ended in discovering that I would have to register to get anything past (very vague) product briefs.  I registered, cursing the annoyance a bit, only to discover that to do so, I would have to sign an NDA.  I gnashed my teeth a bit more, but bit the bullet and clicked through.  I had to provide them with my name, postal address, and a non-free e-mail address.  I thought to myself, surely after all of this, they’ll give me a basic datasheet, and maybe if I’m really lucky, there will be a crippled trial version of their SDK. Ha – no such luck.  I got met with a message telling me that since my e-mail domain was not in their whitelist (read: big corporate customer list), that I essentially signed the NDA, etc. just to get access to a minimum of documentation on a few of their products (not the one I own).  Oh, and the software is $3000, with no student version or institutional discount that I can find.  To make matters worse, you can only program the chip in their custom ASM-like language, and the code runs sandboxed anyway.  So now I’ve signed an NDA, given away a bunch of personal information, and if I try to access what almost any other company would consider basic product information, I still get a permissions error page.

In conclusion, further hacks will not be possible for me to do with this device, unfortunately.  It’s like CSR doesn’t want people to use their products or something.  Since that seems to be the case, I’ll be sure to oblige them whenever possible after I graduate and start working in Industry.

- The Ffej

Merry Christmas!

20 minutes to go… Merry Christmas/$holiday, everyone!
Have an awesome holiday!

Custom Alerts on a Bluetooth-enabled Bracelet

Update:  This got featured on Hack a Day!  Thanks, folks!

Update 2:  Modified BlueZ packages are now posted at the Files link below.  Likely only one is strictly necessary, but I couldn’t be bother figuring out which one it is tonight, so there ye go.

Update 3: The link to the DX Product Page was wrong.  The one that was linked seems to be an enhanced version of the one I have.  I’d be interested in trying it out if it’s substantially different, but it’s not in the budget.

[This is a follow-up to this article]

Well, it’s that time of year again – the time when I recover from exams by staying up far too late working on backlogged fun things.  One of those things was the Bluetooth-enabled bracelet I ordered this spring, which I had been meaning to poke at a bit more.  I now have it displaying (almost) arbitrary text, and have a working demo script in Python that shows the capabilities of the bracelet.  I don’t feel like rewriting everything in the readme, so I’ll just link to it here.  I will however mention the disclaimer that this is a nonstandard hack, completely experimental, and would probably make the Bluetooth standards body members gnash their teeth.  Use at your own risk.  Here’s a pretty picture!

Files: (Corrected link) http://adrestia.creativemisconfiguration.com/files/ffejery/misc/bracelet-hack.tar.gz

Hack a Day Challenge: http://hackaday.com/2009/02/17/hackit-hackable-bluetooth-bracelet/

DX Product Page: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.19489

Happy Hacking!

- The Ffej

COMING, THIS CHRISTMAS…

…a non-zero amount of Blog Content!  Wow!  How about that?

Ahem, yes, anyhow.  I’ve been crazy busy with school, and a project that I can’t talk too freely about at the moment, which is why you haven’t seen anything here for a while.  Rest assured, I have been blogging in my brain, and have a bunch of backlog to share once exams are over.  In recent news, I got a loaner N900 from Nokia (for the aforementioned project), and I love it.  Some of the content pertains to that, and specifically to my experience programming for it.  The Ffej will be back next week, with any luck.

Cheers, and Merry Christmas/Other seasonal holidays

- The Ffej