Question - Feature - BLE

[keldnorman]

Hi

Is there any plans for this project to include detection for bluetooth low energy devices also ?

Regards
Keld Norman

[MS3FGX]

As much as I'd like to add BLE support, I think at this point, it's pretty unlikely to happen.

I started writing Bluelog before BlueZ even supported BLE, so there was no way to know that when they finally added support for it, the scanning process would be completely different than what was already established for regular BT devices. Adding BLE support now would mean rewriting a substantial amount of the original code.

Plus I'm not really comfortable with the idea that BLE scanning requires root permissions, as that opens up potential security issues with a program like this that reads/writes files based on outside influences (BT device names). Years ago somebody already demonstrated that the Live interface could be exploited with a specially crafted device name. That issue has been resolved, but as a precaution, Bluelog and the components used for the Live web functionality will currently refuse to run as root.

I've occasionally thought of working on a sort of Bluelog-NG that would modernize things and support BLE, but if I did that, it would almost certainly be in Python and represent a totally different project that's just inspired by the original code. Part of the reason I used C for Bluelog was so it could run on low-end embedded devices like OpenWRT routers. But now that we have the Raspberry Pi, that's not really a concern anymore.