How to play with Bluetooth under Linux

This is a starter for Bluetooth on Linux. Things are still a little in flux so it may work somewhat differently for you.

Have a program ready on the NXT that sends some data via Bluetooth.

Install bluez-utils and a recent kernel with Bluetooth enabled. (I have Debian with kernel 2.6.17.6 and bluez-utils 3.1 .)

Plug in your Bluetooth dongle (any recent one should do).

Then look at the manpages and play a little with the commands hcitool, sdptool and rfcomm.

To receive data from an NXT do the following:

sdptool add --channel=3 SP

This announces the Serial Port service, hence SP. It may already be done by your system, you can check with sdptool browse local. You may also leave out the --channel option, the default channel is one.

rfcomm listen /dev/rfcomm0 3

This listens on RFCOMM channel three, when the connection is established the device /dev/rfcomm0 will be created and data will arrive there.

On the NXT connect to your host. A sore point is the entry of the pin on the Linux host, for me it is in the file /etc/bluetooth/pin. A "line is busy" message on the NXT can mean anything, e.g. if you forgot one of the commands above.

On another terminal do something like

cat /dev/rfcomm0 | od -t x1 -w1 -v -Ax

start the program on the NXT and watch the data arrive. I had a small program that sent "good job", this is the output I got: