[TriLUG] TriLUG GeekSpark Bluetooth Workshop - Saturday 15th September

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2012, Bill Farrow wrote:

> Hey, On Saturday (tomorrow) we are holding a Linux 
> Bluetooth Workshop at DesignBox, downtown Raleigh.

Thanks to Bill for today's w/s. About a dozen people 
attended.

It was kid and dog friendly and for that extra touch, Bill 
thoughtfully brought in geek food for lunch; cold left-over 
pizza from thursday's meeting.

There was plenty of on-street parking. The location was 
found through friends of Justis. I didn't figure out what 
the place was. It seemed to be an art gallery with a lot of 
computers with big screens.

Bill was the opening act in the morning and got us to 
compile up the standard tools. I had a bt mouse working in 
no time, something I couldn't get to work 5yrs ago when I 
last tried bluetooth. We found that Sarah (evidently a 
person who works at the art gallery), had left her 
MacBookPro on over the weekend with the bt port open 
for all to connect to.

Ronin came in for the afternoon, to give us his live 
BackTrack v5 CD with all the bt tools he had found. I got my 
bt headset to work on linux with Ronin's tools.

Bill showed us his bt OBDII adapter, plugged it into his car 
and then connected to his car from inside the building. Alan 
Porter showed us his serial to bt adapter which he uses with 
an arduino, to send messages to his cell phone when his 
garage door opens. I must have a much smaller house than 
Alan, as I can hear my garage door open from anywhere in the 
house.

I must say bt is a bit of a mess. The other networking 
protocols (ethernet, decnet, ...) are layered and have no 
idea of what's happening at the application layer. In bt, 
all the layers are squashed down to one layer and the bt 
tools have to know what your sending; serial, files, 
audio... It makes bt quite hard to compile up.

Joe



-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!