| Using Bluetooth Serial Port Profile |
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Bluetooth is widely used when it is necessary to provide a wireless access to the devices located in short distances. In this application note we will show how to organize a wireless control channel to the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK running Linux using a USB Bluetooth adapter. In practical embedded applications such a wireless channel may be used to implement a command/response protocol to control your i.MX RT1170 based device via Bluetooth from the host machine (computer, notebook, smart-phone, etc.).
The hardware platform used in this application note is the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK board with a USB Bluetooth adapter plugged into the USB1 or USB2 interface connector. The adapter used by Emcraft to perform the tests documented below was RFCOMM Protocol TDI Bluetooth Device. The generic Linux kernel device driver for the USB transport HCI layer (CONFIG_BT_HCIBTUSB) is used in this configuration so other USB Bluetooth adapters should work as described below too.
The goal is to have the i.MX RT1170 act as a device with the Serial Port Profile (SPP) in the Bluetooth network. The i.MX RT1170 will emulate the serial port over the Bluetooth transport and therefore the host will see the i.MX RT1170 as an ordinary serial RS-232 port. The Bluetooth Serial Port Profile interface is implemented with the BT_RFCOMM_TTY kernel driver. The sdptool and rfcomm utilities, ported from the bluez-utils package to the Linux NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK BSP, are used for configuration. The sdptool utility is used to create the "Serial Port" profile, exported over Bluetooth. The rfcomm utility is started in the "listen" mode and, on the "Serial Port" profile activation, rfcomm emulates a virtual COM port on the /dev/rfcommX device file, looking from the i.MX RT1170 side. The functionality described below is available from the rootfs.uImage project provided by Emcraft for NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK.
We will use the following terminology below:
Test Connectivity Power-on the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK board and wait for the Linux to boot on the Target. Run the Bluetooth daemons in the background: ... Plug-in the Bluetooth adapter to the USB1 interface of the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK board. Observe the messages like these in the Target console: ci_hdrc ci_hdrc.0: EHCI Host Controller Get the <Target address> Bluetooth address of the adapter you have just plugged-in: / # hcitool dev Add the Serial Port profile to the list of Bluetooth profiles. In the example below the Bluetooth channel number to access this profile is 1: / # sdptool add --channel=1 SP Start the background listening for raw connections on the channel 1: / # rfcomm --raw listen /dev/rfcomm0 1 & On the Host, open a raw Bluetooth connection to the Target (<Target Address> Bluetooth Device, channel 1): $ sudo rfcomm --raw connect 0 04:7F:0E:31:B7:94 1 In the Target console observe an indication of the connection from the Host: Connection from BC:77:37:5C:32:57 to /dev/rfcomm0 Send a text string (command) to the Target over the Bluetooth serial port from the Host: $ echo "Hello from Host over the BT Serial" | sudo tee /dev/rfcomm0 On the Target receive the text string (command) just sent from Host: / # cat /dev/rfcomm0 Send a text string (response) from the Target to Host over the Bluetooth serial port: / # echo "Hello from Target over the BT Serial" > /dev/rfcomm0 Receive the text string (response) just sent from the Target over the Bluetooth serial port: $ sudo cat /dev/rfcomm0 Disconnect the Host from the Bluetooth serial line by pressing Ctrl-C in the rfcomm --raw connect ... terminal window: ^C Observe the rfcomm termination on the Target side: / # Disconnected [3] Please note that the rfcomm --raw listen ... command must be re-run on the Target to reopen the Bluetooth serial link again. |