micro:bit Blue

Version: 1.5.4

• Author: Martin Woolley
• Twitter: @bluetooth_mdw
• Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
• you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
• You may obtain a copy of the License at

•  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
  

• Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
• distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
• WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
• See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
• limitations under the License.

Description:

This application contains a series of demonstrations which use the BBC micro:bit Bluetooth profile in various ways. It's purpose is both to act as a demo and to provide a source of example code which shows how to use the Bluetooth profile from Android.

Instructions:

Install the latest apk file from the releases folder. Note that the application requires at least version 2.0.0 of the micro:bit run time and the smartphone or tablet should be paired with the micro:bit before the application can be used.

Requirements:

The application should work on Android version 4.4 or later. Version 5 or later is recommended however. Limited testing has been carried out across Android versions however so please report any issues found.

Known Issues:

1. Needs a demo of analogue output
2. Needs a demo of digital input
3. Needs a demo of analogue input
4. Sometimes the digital output demo is unable to determine the initial state of pin 0
5. Animal Vegetable Mineral demo: If you disconnect from the micro:bit then reconnect you will not receive indication messages from the micro:bit any more. Reset the micro:bit and reconnect to solve this. Awaiting new micro:bit API to avoid the underlying issue.

Version History:

1.5.4

• It's now possible to switch off data smoothing in the Accelerometer screen to see the effect it has

1.5.3

• Bug fix: out of range x/y coordinates sometimes broke touch processing in game controller.

1.5.2

• Bug fix: bug processing touch events in game controller caused rare crashes.

1.5.1

• Bug fix: application crashed when launched if Bluetooth was not already switched on

1.5.0

• Added further information to the main help screen

1.4.9

• Changed application name to micro:bit Blue

1.4.8

• Added the Trivia Scoreboard demo

1.4.7

• Swapped UART TX and RX UUIDs to be in line with Nordic Semiconductor official documentation. Note that this was correct with respect to earlier versions of the micro:bit runtime code. An underlying issue regarding the UART service, its characteristics and their properties has since been fixed and so the Animal Vegetable Mineral demo will only work with a hex file build from this later code base. The fix in question went into github master on 25th May 2016.

1.4.6

• Added Refresh Services menu item to the demo Menu Activity. GATT services (and characteristics and descriptors) discovered when connecting to a micro:bit are cached by Android. There's currently no way to tell Android that the GATT services 9etc) have changed because your micro:bit code has changed and so this menu item lets you manually initiate flushing of the cache and a full service (re)discovery process. If you get an error message saying a demo cannot be used because your micro:bit doesn't have a required Bluetooth service and you are 100% convinced it does have it, try using the Refresh Services menu option.

1.4.5

• Added UART service Animal Vegetable Mineral demo
• Tightened up closing of BluetoothGatt object on disconnect in the hope that this will improve realisbility on older Android versions
• Guarded execution of some operations in BleAdapterService according to the connection state
• moved wrapping of UI text messages originating from the BleAdapterService to the Activity that receives them

1.4.4

• Added simple interpretation of Magnetometer Bearing data, display the nearest point of the compass

1.4.3

• Included device Bluetooth address in scan results list to make it possible to distinguish between multiple paired micro:bits

1.4.2

• Removed redundant DualDPadControllerActivity.java
• Fixed game controller event code initialisation bug
• Fixed bug which resulted in attempts to pair with an unpaired micro:bit when the main settings screen had deselected filtering of unpaired devices i.e. we want to be able to work with unpaired micro:bits probably because we're developing and testing.
• Fixed bug in multi-touch handling in the dual d-pad game controller

1.4.1

• Display current heart rate instead of histogram every 10 seconds

1.4.0

• Added Heart Rate Histogram demo

1.3.1

• Improved D-Pad Controller screen with proper graphic
• Introduced vibration for feedback when using the D-Pad Controller
• Introduced multi-touch support for the D-Pad Controller
• Event Code and Event Values used by the D-Pad Controller are now configurable in a Settings screen.
• Tidied up layout of some screens to work better across Android device types

1.3.0

• Added Dual D-Pad Controller demo
• Added screen orientation properties for all activities
• Changed keep alive function to read the firmware revision string characteristic since the hardware revision string characteristic is being removed from the profile
• Removed hardware revision string from the device information screen

1.2.0

• Added Bluetooth Services menu item to the menu page. Produces a report showing which Bluetooth services are present on or absent from the connected micro:bit 1.2.0

• Modified to work with the "out of box" general release of the micro:bit runtime which uses Bluetooth security including pairing and white listing.

1.1.0

• Uses Android 5 scanning APIs if on 5.0 or later else uses old scanning APIs

1.0.0

• Initial version which used the Android 4.x scanning APIs

Contributing

Pull Requests are not being accepted at this time. If you find a bug or have an idea for a new feature, please submit details in the issue tracker. In the case of new features, it may be possible to collaborate on the development. This will be assessed on a case by case basis.

Thank you