VIVI SPECIFIC NOTES

This repository contains a modified version of noble-winrt which allows for better BLE scanning. Hopefully this is made redundant by the web bluetooth API, which is partially supported by Chrome. For now, we need this library to retrieve the advertisement data broadcast by all boxes in the vicinity.

The unmodified version of noble-winrt does not even attempt to retrieve any service data. This version of noble-winrt retrieves service data associated with 16 bit UUIDs from the raw AD structures that comprise the advertisement payload. The prebuilt BLEServer.exe comes from the web-bluetooth-polyfill repository that vivi also has a copy of. That version of web-bluetooth-polyfill has been modified to serialise the raw AD structure data so it can be serialised here.

Noble (Node.js Bluetooth LE) Bindings for Windows

noble-winrt is a small UWP-to-noble bridge based on the web-bluetooth-polyfill project. It supports BLE connectivity on Windows without the need for a dongle and complicated driver set-up. It is similar to noble-uwp but may work better for some build processes.

Getting Started

Install with npm or yarn:

npm install --save noble-winrt

Then simply use in place of noble:

const noble = require('noble-winrt');

noble-winrt will perform exactly the same as noble on non-Windows systems. However, it will use the WinRT bindings on Windows instead of noble's default Bluetooth HCI bindings.

Integrating with bleat

If you'd like to use this library to work with the Web Bluetooth api through bleat, you will have to replace noble to noble-winrt. Running the following command in a powershell terminal in the directory containing your project's node_modules should take care of that:

node -e "var fs = require('fs'), `
  f = 'node_modules/bleat/dist/adapter.noble.js'; `
  fs.writeFileSync(f, fs.readFileSync(f).toString().replace(`
    'require(\'noble\')', 'require(\'noble-winrt\')'))"