Experimental unofficial Bluetooth API for Android

Code license:
Apache License 2.0

Featured downloads:

AndroidBluetoothAPI_0.3.jar

AndroidBluetoothAPI_javadoc_0.3.zip
AndroidBluetoothAPI_src_0.3.zip

Important News

Now (2009/10/27) that Android 2.0 supports Bluetooth, we will redesign our (unofficial) Bluetooth API for Android to be as much similar as possible to the official API. This way:

- applications running on Android 1.1, 1.5 and 1.6 based on Bluetooth API will be easily ported to Android 2.0

- devices not upgraded to latest firmware version will be able to run Bluetooth features

Redesigned API will be published as "Bluetooth API 1.0" and it is expected to be available the first week of November.

Description

This project aims to provide a simple API to access Android's Bluetooth stack. This library does not to require a rooted device: it is intended to work with standard firmware provided by phone manufacturers.

Currently only remote device scanning, remote device pairing, (partial) service discovery (SDP) and client RFCOMM serial connections are supported. Support for other profiles (e.g. audio) than RFCOMM is not available. RFCOMM server connections are still not supported.

This library is to be considered as experimental, it has not been designed nor tested for production environments. Any future change to the Bluetooth stack on Android releases could make this library totally useless. Although it has been successfully tested on firmware 1.1, 1.5 "cupcake" and 1.6 "donut", do not expect to get it work on future releases (even minor updates). Use it at your own risk.

Check the sample application "Bluetooth Samples" on the Android Market.

Don't forget to add following permissions to your application:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH"/>

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH_ADMIN"/>

 

The (unofficial) Bluetooth API for Android has been tested on:

• HTC Dream (aka T-Mobile G1, firmware 1.1, 1.5 and 1.6)
• HTC Magic (firmware 1.5 and 1.6)
• HTC Tattoo (firmware 1.6)
• Huawei U8220 (aka T-Mobile Pulse, firmware 1.5)
• (partially tested) Samsung Galaxy (firmware 1.5)

It has been reported as NOT working on HTC Hero (I have not this handset, therefore I could not do any investigation to date). Still not tested on Archos 5 Internet Tablet and Zii EGG (which still does not support Bluetooth on its Android porting).

http://code.google.com/p/android-bluetooth

BluetoothAPIHowto  

This page will contain code snippets to show how to use the Bluetooth API for Android.

Initialization

Don't forget to add following permissions to the AndroidManifest.xml of your application:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH_ADMIN"/>
 

The entry-point for the Bluetooth API is LocalBluetoothDevice class, that has to be initialized with a Context instance (for instance, current Activity):

LocalBluetoothDevice
 localBT 
=
 
LocalBluetoothDevice
.
initLocalDevice
(
_context
);

LocalBluetoothDevice must be closed before leaving the activity. The best is to close it in the onDestroy() callback:

@Override
protected void onDestroy() {
   if (localBT != null) {
   localBT.close();
   }
   super.onDestroy();
}
 

Bluetooth enable/disable

TO BE ADDED

Bluetooth device discovery

TO BE ADDED