I was also thinking of using JavaBluetooth with USB dongles and I just realized that it is probably not possible yet. I plan to use Epox dongles (several dongles in several machines) and I already played with one o windows. It seems that it does install a serial port for the dongle, but as far I can see this virtual port only support SPP (bluetooth serial port profile).
I tried to start BluetoothServer from the demo package bat it stopped at 'HCI: Sending Command: 3075". Does anyone know of a USB BT dongle that has a driver which implements the HCI UART protocol? Or is it possible to use some virtual com port driver (for windows) to drive the dongle with?
Another solution might be to add USBTransport to the stack, say using jUSB (http://jusb.sourceforge.net/). Chris, do you think that it's a feasible solution? I haven't dig too deeply into the sources, but as far as I understand one only needs to create an implementation for the HCIDriver interface. And actually it doesn't seem to be too complicated (at least UARTTransport isn't). Though I have to say that I haven't dealt with USB yet.
Any oppinions? Probably I'll try to implement that USBTransport class.
atleta (Laszlo Marai)
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You won't be able to find a USB Dongel that uses HCI UART. They all use the HCI USB. But yeah I've looked at jusb before. It looks very promissing, but lately I've been really short on time. But if you would like to take a shot that would be great. If you have any questions or need any help let me know.
Chris
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I was playing with jusb today, but I wasn't able to make it work under windows. It didn't find the Host Controller (not a very promising result ;) ). I was suggesting my boss to allocate 2-3 days to this task, but probably we'll have a look at serial port dongles first. (Anyway it's a more feasible solution to us, because as far as I understand, we'll won't be able to use JavaBluetooth+jUSB with a USB dongle on a windows box if it already has its own drivers installed. And we wan't to deploy our software on windows boxes that already have working USB BT dongles and their users would be quite unhappy if we removed the drivers :) )
Anyway, I'm really interested in doing the USB transport, so I'll try to do it somehow if I can make jUSB work.
Laszlo Marai (atleta)
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i'm really interesting if you have successfully get the jUSB working with JavaBluetooth.
If not, what solution do you found? The only serial port dongle, which i know at the moment ist from Brainboxes. But this one is much expensive (300 $).
Thanks for any suggestions.
Peter
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Unfortunately I couldn't get jUSB working at all on windows, soI gave up for a while. I compiled it, but it wasn't able to access the host controller, so I couldn't do anything with it. I asked the developer of jUSB what the problem could be , as there was an NPE thrown from the native part of jUSB, but I didn't get an answer.
This is actually a big problem for us, as we should somehow have our software deployed on about 20 windows desktops with BT dongles for testing purposes. I hope to find a solution while we're developing and testing the application.
I've read in some messages in this forum that the CF card based BT interfaces usually have the HCI UART interface. Now I'm not sure if this could work, but there are CF card readers for PCs that could possibly be used to access the BT CF cards... I'll give it a try unless someone tells me that it can't work :), but it will take a few weeks before I get there.
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Laszlo, I'm interested in how you solved your problem. I'm also using USB dongles and trying to make them work with J2SE. But till now I only made them work using a tryout version of a paid driver and JSR82 implementation (Atinav AveLink).
But I need this working with free software, cause the implementation sources will be used later.
Could you get jUSB to work? What bluetooth device are you using now?
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In the end we did not solve the problem. It was a research project involving mobile phones. We wanted to use a set of PCs to simulate phones but in the end we stuck with the real devices. I couldn't get jUSB work. I just revisited their page and now it says that it works only on linux. I can't remember if they stated it also a year ago and I was too sloppy to recognize it or if it has been added since then. Anyway, it seems that jUSB does not support win32 (they say that there is some code in the CVS) and it also seems that the project is kind of dead.
I still think that with a working java USB library it wouldn't be too hard to implement the USBTransport for javabluetooth. But I might be wrong as nobody did it during the year that passed since I posted this idea here :-).
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Hi,
I was also thinking of using JavaBluetooth with USB dongles and I just realized that it is probably not possible yet. I plan to use Epox dongles (several dongles in several machines) and I already played with one o windows. It seems that it does install a serial port for the dongle, but as far I can see this virtual port only support SPP (bluetooth serial port profile).
I tried to start BluetoothServer from the demo package bat it stopped at 'HCI: Sending Command: 3075". Does anyone know of a USB BT dongle that has a driver which implements the HCI UART protocol? Or is it possible to use some virtual com port driver (for windows) to drive the dongle with?
Another solution might be to add USBTransport to the stack, say using jUSB (http://jusb.sourceforge.net/). Chris, do you think that it's a feasible solution? I haven't dig too deeply into the sources, but as far as I understand one only needs to create an implementation for the HCIDriver interface. And actually it doesn't seem to be too complicated (at least UARTTransport isn't). Though I have to say that I haven't dealt with USB yet.
Any oppinions? Probably I'll try to implement that USBTransport class.
atleta (Laszlo Marai)
Laszlo,
You won't be able to find a USB Dongel that uses HCI UART. They all use the HCI USB. But yeah I've looked at jusb before. It looks very promissing, but lately I've been really short on time. But if you would like to take a shot that would be great. If you have any questions or need any help let me know.
Chris
Hi,
I was playing with jusb today, but I wasn't able to make it work under windows. It didn't find the Host Controller (not a very promising result ;) ). I was suggesting my boss to allocate 2-3 days to this task, but probably we'll have a look at serial port dongles first. (Anyway it's a more feasible solution to us, because as far as I understand, we'll won't be able to use JavaBluetooth+jUSB with a USB dongle on a windows box if it already has its own drivers installed. And we wan't to deploy our software on windows boxes that already have working USB BT dongles and their users would be quite unhappy if we removed the drivers :) )
Anyway, I'm really interested in doing the USB transport, so I'll try to do it somehow if I can make jUSB work.
Laszlo Marai (atleta)
Hi Laszlo Marai,
i'm really interesting if you have successfully get the jUSB working with JavaBluetooth.
If not, what solution do you found? The only serial port dongle, which i know at the moment ist from Brainboxes. But this one is much expensive (300 $).
Thanks for any suggestions.
Peter
Hi Peter,
Unfortunately I couldn't get jUSB working at all on windows, soI gave up for a while. I compiled it, but it wasn't able to access the host controller, so I couldn't do anything with it. I asked the developer of jUSB what the problem could be , as there was an NPE thrown from the native part of jUSB, but I didn't get an answer.
This is actually a big problem for us, as we should somehow have our software deployed on about 20 windows desktops with BT dongles for testing purposes. I hope to find a solution while we're developing and testing the application.
I've read in some messages in this forum that the CF card based BT interfaces usually have the HCI UART interface. Now I'm not sure if this could work, but there are CF card readers for PCs that could possibly be used to access the BT CF cards... I'll give it a try unless someone tells me that it can't work :), but it will take a few weeks before I get there.
Laszlo, I'm interested in how you solved your problem. I'm also using USB dongles and trying to make them work with J2SE. But till now I only made them work using a tryout version of a paid driver and JSR82 implementation (Atinav AveLink).
But I need this working with free software, cause the implementation sources will be used later.
Could you get jUSB to work? What bluetooth device are you using now?
Hi Gabriel,
In the end we did not solve the problem. It was a research project involving mobile phones. We wanted to use a set of PCs to simulate phones but in the end we stuck with the real devices. I couldn't get jUSB work. I just revisited their page and now it says that it works only on linux. I can't remember if they stated it also a year ago and I was too sloppy to recognize it or if it has been added since then. Anyway, it seems that jUSB does not support win32 (they say that there is some code in the CVS) and it also seems that the project is kind of dead.
I still think that with a working java USB library it wouldn't be too hard to implement the USBTransport for javabluetooth. But I might be wrong as nobody did it during the year that passed since I posted this idea here :-).