How do I read Bluetooth Low Energy transmitted data programmatically on Mac OS X 10.9.5?

Question

I'm trying to read Bluetooth Low Energy transmitted data programtically using Ruby. Bluetooth Low Energy technology provides no support for the Serial Port Profile (SPP) in the standard Specification v4.0.

With older Bluetooth communication methods, one can just read the serial port for Bluetooth incoming data (/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port). Clearly, this won’t work for Bluetooth Low Energy, given it works almost completely differently.

I came across a few tools like LightBlue and XCode Hardware IO tools to read the data transmitted by the said Bluetooth Low Energy device but I’m not sure how they work. Can somebody help?

Answer 1

Reading up on fundamentals really helped me a lot. Here's a link to great post explaining BLE basics. Having understood this, on OSX I ended us using noble to establish connection and read BLE transmitted UART data using another library using noble called blendmicro.

We didn't use blendmicro BLE chip but still were able to use blendmicro-node library. If you read through blendmicro.js, it's easily modifiable to suit any BLE chip that uses UART for data transmission.