Tag: IoT

Playing with Bluetooth Smart devices on Fedora

So I have a few Bluetooth Smart (AKA BT Low Energy or BT-LE) devices including a BeeWi SmartClim Smart Temperature & Humidity Sensor, a TI SensorTag2 and a Runtasic Orbit activity tracker. I thought I’d see if I could connect to them with something other than their proprietary apps that run on my phone and get anything useful out of them.

To do this I installed a Fedora 23 minimal image on a micro SD card for BeagleBone Black, inserted a CSR USB Bluetooth 4.0 dongle and powered it up. Once I’d completed the first boot wizard and logged in I installed the bluetooth command line utility packages with a “sudo dnf install -y bluez bluez-libs”. You don’t need to use a BeagleBone, you can use any ARM device or even a standard laptop which supports Bluetooth 4+ with BT-LE support.

Now that we have a device running we’re ready to start to play.

First lets see if our system sees our bluetooth dongle:

$ sudo hcitool dev
Devices:
	hci0	AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:33

Then lets scan for any Bluetooth Smart devices that are in range:

$ sudo hcitool lescan 
LE Scan ...
A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 (unknown)
A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 CC2650 SensorTag
A9:B8:C7:D6:E5:F4 (unknown)
A9:B8:C7:D6:E5:F4 BeeWi SmartClim

Now create a connection to the device we discovered:

$ sudo hcitool lecc A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6
Connection handle 3586

In the bluez package gatttool is a tool we can use to interact with Bluetooth Smart devices. We can use gatttool in interactive mode to send commands to out previously scanned device address:

sudo gatttool -b A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6 -I
[78:A5:04:5B:7D:9A][LE]>

Now we connect to the deivce (note in older version of gattool the prefix would change from “[ ]” to “[CON]” now it changes the colour of the BT MAC):

[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]> connect
Attempting to connect to A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6
Connection successful
[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]>

We can request the device characteristics:

[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]> characteristics
handle: 0x0002, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0003, uuid: 00002a00-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0004, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0005, uuid: 00002a01-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0006, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0007, uuid: 00002a04-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0009, char properties: 0x20, char value handle: 0x000a, uuid: 00002a05-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x000d, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x000e, uuid: 00002a23-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x000f, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0010, uuid: 00002a24-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0011, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0012, uuid: 00002a25-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0013, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0014, uuid: 00002a26-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0015, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0016, uuid: 00002a27-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0017, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x0018, uuid: 00002a28-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0019, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x001a, uuid: 00002a29-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x001b, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x001c, uuid: 00002a2a-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x001d, char properties: 0x02, char value handle: 0x001e, uuid: 00002a50-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x0020, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0021, uuid: f000aa01-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0023, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0024, uuid: f000aa02-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0025, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0026, uuid: f000aa03-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0028, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0029, uuid: f000aa21-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x002b, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x002c, uuid: f000aa22-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x002d, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x002e, uuid: f000aa23-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0030, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0031, uuid: f000aa41-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0033, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0034, uuid: f000aa42-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0035, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0036, uuid: f000aa44-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0038, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0039, uuid: f000aa81-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x003b, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x003c, uuid: f000aa82-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x003d, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x003e, uuid: f000aa83-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0040, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x0041, uuid: f000aa71-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0043, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0044, uuid: f000aa72-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0045, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0046, uuid: f000aa73-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0048, char properties: 0x10, char value handle: 0x0049, uuid: 0000ffe1-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb
handle: 0x004d, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x004e, uuid: f000aa65-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x004f, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0050, uuid: f000aa66-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0052, char properties: 0x1a, char value handle: 0x0053, uuid: f000ac01-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0055, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0056, uuid: f000ac02-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0057, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0058, uuid: f000ac03-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x005a, char properties: 0x12, char value handle: 0x005b, uuid: f000ccc1-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x005d, char properties: 0x08, char value handle: 0x005e, uuid: f000ccc2-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x005f, char properties: 0x08, char value handle: 0x0060, uuid: f000ccc3-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0062, char properties: 0x1c, char value handle: 0x0063, uuid: f000ffc1-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
handle: 0x0066, char properties: 0x1c, char value handle: 0x0067, uuid: f000ffc2-0451-4000-b000-000000000000
[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]>

Request the name of the device by querying the appropriate characteristic by hhandle:

[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]> char-read-hnd 0x3
Characteristic value/descriptor: 53 65 6e 73 6f 72 54 61 67 20 32 2e 30 
[A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6][LE]>

The response is returned as a hexadecimal string. To make it readable we need to convert it to ASCII with some simple python:

 python
Python 2.7.10 (default, Sep  8 2015, 17:20:17) 
[GCC 5.1.1 20150618 (Red Hat 5.1.1-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> "53656e736f7254616720322e30".decode("hex")
'SensorTag 2.0'
>>>

So that’s the basics of playing with Bluetooth Smart on the command line. I want to work out all of the characteristics and write a simple python daemon to poll the device and then write the output to different locations depending on the config like to a text file or to a MQTT message bus.

Getting IoT kick started on Fedora

So a number of people have been discussing the Internet of Things on Fedora for some time. We now have a Fedora IoT mailing list where these discussions can be more centralised and directed.

So where and how do we get started here? I’m going to kick start some ideas here and repost it as a mail to the list so we can use it as a basis to start the discussion.

As I outlined in my Using Fedora as a base for the IoT revolution talk at Flock there’s a lot of use cases and components that make up a complete IoT stack. I think initially we should focus on two initial goals rather than biting off too much:

  • A IoT internet gateway device
  • A IoT sensors endpoint device

The general idea here is that both of the above would be a very minimal shared build, likely using atomic images to enable easy update/rollback with some specific components for each use case. Initially I suggest we focus on a single, or maybe a couple, of specific devices to limit the scope to something more achievable and to add features as we go.

IoT internet gateway device specs and features

  • Wired and/or wireless ethernet to provide internet connectivity
  • Bluetooth Smart (AKA LE)
  • Thread Stack support (6LoWPAN and friends)
  • 802.15.4 support
  • MQTT Broker support (not standard for a IoT GW but enables easier localised testing)
  • MQTT Client
  • Atomic support: updates, rollback etc
  • Works with both our endpoint below and other IoT OSes such as Contiki

IoT internet sensors endpoint specs and features

  • Wired or wireless ethernet IP support
  • Bluetooth Smart (AKA LE)
  • Equivalent to Thread Stack support (6LoWPAN and friends)
  • MQTT Broker support (not standard for a IoT GW but enables easier testing
  • MQTT Client
  • CoAP client
  • Atomic support: updates, rollback etc
  • Support for various inputs and outputs and sensors

I have no doubt missed a lot of details in the above use cases, it’s somewhere to start. I think we also need to look at tools like Node-RED and tools for managing the devices. IoT is a big topic, the idea is we need to get the conversation start somewhere. I’ll look forward to seeing you all on the list to do that.