BleakServer

[kevincar]

Currently, bleak establishes a BleakClient that can scan for BLE peripheral devices.

Are there any future plans to implement a BleakServer to establish a central device that can advertise services and characteristics that other devices can connect to?

I imagine a BleakServer could utilize BleakGATTService and BleakGATTCharacteristic objects to set up and manage user-defined services that are then advertised and could be read from, written and/or subscribed to.

[hbldh]

It would be nice but there are no immediate plans; I have had ideas about a Flask-like decorator approach to adding services and characeristics. It does however require a renaming of this package since it then no loger is a Platform agnostic client but also a server...
My focus have been set on getting the macOS backend in place first; but now that it has been almost released, I have to find a new milestone for bleak...

[filips123]

@hbldh Any update? Bleak is an amazing cross-platform BLE client. However, BLE server (possibly also cross-platform) would be another amazing and needed addition.

[kevincar]

@filips123 Until there are future plans to implement a BLE server into bleak, some colleagues and I implemented a rough draft of a server for bleak. We'v tested it on both Windows and OS X platforms and it works for our purposes (no Linux yet). Hopefully something similar can be officially added to bleak in the future; although as it has been noted, in this case, bleak is no longer a client only package.

[hbldh]

The main reason for not implementing a server part in Bleak is that I as a developer has no personal usecase for it. I am reluctant to add that functionality to Bleak since I am struggling to maintain this project as it is, and it would be detrimental to its health to add another part for which I have no personal interest.
It would be much better if someone else would take the lessons learned in this project and make a standalone server-package, much like @kevincar has done. Everyone would benefit from that instead of adding it here, I think.

[hbldh]

Closing this since it is outside of the Bleak project scope.

[kevincar]

As a reference, and for those looking for a potential cross-platform python BLE peripheral solution, I decided to create a companion project from that rough draft previously mentioned as a companion to this project.

Thanks for the motivation @hbldh!

[cspensky]

@kevincar I'd love to help out with bless and get this functionality stable.

[kevincar]

@cspensky Certainly! Feel free to fork it, submit pull requests, open issues, or begin discussions there.