Finding Bluetooth low energy with python

Question

Is it possible for this code to be modified to include Bluetooth Low Energy devices as well? https://code.google.com/p/pybluez/source/browse/trunk/examples/advanced/inquiry-with-rssi.py?r=1

I can find devices like my phone and other bluetooth 4.0 devices, but not any BLE. If this cannot be modified, is it possible to run the hcitool lescan and pull the data from hci dump within python? I can use the tools to see the devices I am looking for and it gives an RSSI in hcidump, which is what my end goal is. To get a MAC address and RSSI from the BLE device.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could also try pygattlib. It can be used to discover devices, and (currently) there is a basic support for reading/writing characteristics. No RSSI for now.

You could discover using the following snippet:

from gattlib import DiscoveryService

service = DiscoveryService("hci0")
devices = service.discover(2)

DiscoveryService accepts the name of the device, and the method discover accepts a timeout (in seconds) for waiting responses. devices is a dictionary, with BL address as keys, and names as values.

pygattlib is packaged for Debian (or Ubuntu), and also available as a pip package.

Answer 2

As I said in the comment, that library won't work with BLE.

Here's some example code to do a simple BLE scan:

import sys
import os
import struct
from ctypes import (CDLL, get_errno)
from ctypes.util import find_library
from socket import (
    socket,
    AF_BLUETOOTH,
    SOCK_RAW,
    BTPROTO_HCI,
    SOL_HCI,
    HCI_FILTER,
)

if not os.geteuid() == 0:
    sys.exit("script only works as root")

btlib = find_library("bluetooth")
if not btlib:
    raise Exception(
        "Can't find required bluetooth libraries"
        " (need to install bluez)"
    )
bluez = CDLL(btlib, use_errno=True)

dev_id = bluez.hci_get_route(None)

sock = socket(AF_BLUETOOTH, SOCK_RAW, BTPROTO_HCI)
sock.bind((dev_id,))

err = bluez.hci_le_set_scan_parameters(sock.fileno(), 0, 0x10, 0x10, 0, 0, 1000);
if err < 0:
    raise Exception("Set scan parameters failed")
    # occurs when scanning is still enabled from previous call

# allows LE advertising events
hci_filter = struct.pack(
    "<IQH", 
    0x00000010, 
    0x4000000000000000, 
    0
)
sock.setsockopt(SOL_HCI, HCI_FILTER, hci_filter)

err = bluez.hci_le_set_scan_enable(
    sock.fileno(),
    1,  # 1 - turn on;  0 - turn off
    0, # 0-filtering disabled, 1-filter out duplicates
    1000  # timeout
)
if err < 0:
    errnum = get_errno()
    raise Exception("{} {}".format(
        errno.errorcode[errnum],
        os.strerror(errnum)
    ))

while True:
    data = sock.recv(1024)
    # print bluetooth address from LE Advert. packet
    print(':'.join("{0:02x}".format(x) for x in data[12:6:-1]))

I had to piece all of that together by looking at the hcitool and gatttool source code that comes with Bluez. The code is completely dependent on libbluetooth-dev so you'll have to make sure you have that installed first.

A better way would be to use dbus to make calls to bluetoothd, but I haven't had a chance to research that yet. Also, the dbus interface is limited in what you can do with a BLE connection after you make one.

EDIT:

Martin Tramšak pointed out that in Python 2 you need to change the last line to print(':'.join("{0:02x}".format(ord(x)) for x in data[12:6:-1]))