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
CBCentralManagerDelegateandCBPeripheralDelegatemethods 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.
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.
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.
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.
WLXBluetoothDevice is available through CocoaPods. To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:
pod "WLXBluetoothDevice"
Once the pod is installed you can add the following header to your prefix file:
#import <WLXBluetoothDevice/WLXBluetoothDevice.h>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 .
This project is maintained by Guido Marucci Blas and it was written by Wolox.
WLXBluetoothDevice is available under the MIT license.
Copyright (c) 2014 Guido Marucci Blas <[email protected]>
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