bluetooth

[platon42]

> no, don't bother at all... there is no bluetooth stack.

And I'm not sure there ever will be. Last time I spoke with the Bluetooth SIG Marketing Director at the Bluetooth Open Houses in October, he said that I would have to pay 10,000 USD for qualifying my product (i.e. the Bluetooth Stack) and that it's very unlikely that the SIG will reduce that fee for me as a single developer.

I doubt you can imagine how this feels after spending a lot of time and work in developing the stack :-(

[platon42]

What does that 10,000 get you? The right to develop a Bluetooth stack? Or some insider knowledge on the protocols?

To get access to the Bluetooth specifications, you have to register and agree to some licence conditions. These conditions also include the use of the Bluetooth trademark and symbol, but only on products which have been previously qualified by the Bluetooth SIG. The qualifications process includes testing against the ProfileTestSuite (USD 7,000 standalone). Usually, these qualifications test is done by the Bluetooth Chipset Vendors for Bluetooth Devices. Companies with dedicated Bluetooth Stack IP like Broadcom, CSR, Microsoft, OpenInterface and IVT live on selling and licencing their Bluetooth products and hence, the USD 10,000 is a piece of cake.

If the bluetooth device is sending RS232 serial data encapsulated in bluetooth packets, and the bluetooth transceiver you have connected to your serial port is capable of stripping out the bluetooth protocol from each packet and passing it to the serial port as bare RS232 data, then it could work. But this relies on the device sending such data (RS232 encapsulated in Bluetooth). In reality, most Bluetooth devices use protocols which are part of the full Bluetooth stack rather than wrapping RS232 in Bluetooth transport protocols. This means a full implementation of the Bluetooth stack would be required for AmigaOS to understand the traffic.

No, that's not that easy. A bluetooth dongle for USB for example, sends USB packets. These USB packets build up a USB transfer. One USB transfer may contain an ACL packet, which can be fragmented across multiple USB transfers. Each ACL packet then again contains one or more L2CAP packets, which in turn can be fragmented across multiple ACL packets. The L2CAP packized data stream is the basis for higher level protocols such as RFCOMM. And you have guessed right, RFCOMM serial data packets are again multiplexed (up to 62 connections at the same time) for such a simple thing as a serial line, which is defined in the SerialPortProfile, using RFCOMM, using L2CAP, using ACL transport, using the USB HCI.

And this was just the data flow. Each layer has a separate control state machine for establishing a Bluetooth ACL link, a L2CAP connection, opening an RFCOMM channel.

And yeah, a few months ago, I had my BT MP3 Headsets working through A2DP, AVDTP, L2CAP and HCI. Sigh. And I opened my first RFCOMM channel...

Well, if somebody finds a legal hole in these licence agreements to avoid paying the 10,000 USD and still be able to release the stack, go ahead and tell me.