iPhone corebluetooth central Manager send data to peripheral

TechFanatic picture TechFanatic · Sep 26, 2013 · Viewed 13k times · Source

I want to send data from iPhone to a bluetooth device which get discovered and connects. I am referring this tutorial to connect.

I am not able to send data to external bluetooth device which is connected as we do with External Accessory framework.

I am using iPhone5 as it has Bluetooth 4.0

Answer

allprog picture allprog · Sep 26, 2013

In Core Bluetooth you need to use the characteristics for communication. There is no standard stream based API like in the External Accessory Framework and I don't know of any open source libraries that implement something like that.

Basic operation

Peripheral -> Central:

  1. Central subscribes to characteristic (either with notifications or indications)
  2. Peripheral receives the subscribed callback so knows that the central is listening
  3. Peripheral updates characteristic
  4. Central receives characteristic updated notification

Central -> Peripheral:

  1. Central writes characteristic
  2. Peripheral receives write request update

The actual speed you can achieve depends on various factors. With indications the data is never lost (like TCP) but notifications don't have such guarantees (like UDP).

More info

I suggest you check out the official Core Bluetooth Programming Guide and concentrate on the

sections. But better would be studying the whole guide as is. For a working example, check out the BTLE Transfer example from Apple, as well.