WLXBluetoothDevice 0.2.0-alpha4

WLXBluetoothDevice 0.2.0-alpha4

TestsTested
LangLanguage Obj-CObjective C
License MIT
ReleasedLast Release Apr 2015

Maintained by Guido Marucci Blas.



WLXBluetoothDevice 0.2.0-alpha4

  • By
  • Guido Marucci Blas

WLXBluetoothDevice is a library we have developed at Wolox after working in several Bluetooth 4.0 related projects. For those who have used CoreBluetooth before would know that the API is not the most pleasant to use. The CoreBluetooth API is heavily based on delegators that have too much responsibility and its asynchronous nature makes it really easy to end up with spaghetti code.

WLXBluetoothDevice is block-based wrapper of CoreBluetooth that handles most of the boilerplate for you. It was designed with the following goals in mind:

  • Avoid having to deal with complex asynchronous logic spread all over several delegate methods.
  • Reduce the amount of ceremony necessary to start exchanging data between two devices.
  • Handle all the CBCentralManagerDelegate and CBPeripheralDelegate methods internally and expose a block-based API to the user.
  • Implement common uses cases and patterns that are found in most BLE apps.
  • Provide a clean architecture to build maintainable code on top of it.
  • Facilitate automated testing of Bluetooth dependent code.

Here are some of the most relevant features that are included in WLXBluetoothDevice:

  • Connection timeouts
  • Reconnection strategies
  • Block-based API
  • Automatic characteristic discovery
  • NSNotifications for Bluetooth connection and discovery events.
  • Storage service to remember devices.

Dependencies

We wanted to minimize the use of external dependencies and we commit not to include any other external library unless that library solves a huge problem. The only dependency that WLXBluetoothDevice has is CocoaLumberjack because is a great library and you should use it. Also if you need to debug what is happening with the Bluetooth connection you can turn our logger on and you will get a lot of information about what the library is doing.

Future versions

We want version 0.1.0 to be the core base set of features and then build more cool stuff on top of it. We plan to add a ReactiveCocoa API as a separate sub spec, so for those who like reactive functional programming there will be a signal based API.

Once CocoaPods supports Swift we will add it as a first class citizen, exposing an API that feels more natural in Swift.

Usage

To run the example project, clone the repo, and run pod install from the Example directory first. To actually use the example app you need a Bluetooth peripheral that exposes certain characteristics in a certain way. That is why we made a test iOS app that acts as a peripheral in the way the example project expects it. You can clone the test app from here.

Installation

Once the pod is installed you can add the following header to your prefix file:

#import <WLXBluetoothDevice/WLXBluetoothDevice.h>

Documentation

You can check the library's wiki for documentation and examples of how to use different APIs. If there is something missing in the wiki you can .

About

This project is maintained by Guido Marucci Blas and it was written by Wolox.

Wolox

License

WLXBluetoothDevice is available under the MIT license.

Copyright (c) 2014 Guido Marucci Blas <[email protected]>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
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copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
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