All of this so far has been fine and dandy, but you're hardly going to want to be fiddling with the Ci20 every time you want to operate a bluetooth lightbulb. Wouldn't we much rather control it from our personal computer, or perhaps a smart phone? To that end, we will now work on a way of integrating our bluetooth device with FlowCloud.
[Read more]Once you've extablished control of the peripheral using gatttool's interactive mode, the next step is to establish a way of controlling it programmatically. Here, we accomplish this using pexpect, a library for controlling command line programs in Python. Make sure you have pexpect installed on the Ci20:
[Read more]First things first, set up the Ci20. You can do all of the development for this project directly on the Ci20 if you wish, either by hooking it up to a monitor through HDMI or running it headless and connecting to it via ssh. Developing on the Ci20 makes experimenting easier, because you don't need to re-upload your software each time you want to test something. After you've set up the Ci20, you'll need to install the BlueZ bluetooth stack from source. Open a terminal and run the following (the sudo password is ci20):
[Read more]Start by reverse engineering the control protocol for the bulb, as demonstrated in this guide. Note: If you’re using a peripheral that implements a standard service, the following process will not be necessary. The salient points are as follows:
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