Thanks for the info.  I'm not an expert mac developer either - so I switched to using a linux box for what I'm trying to do. (A raspberry pi with built in bluetooth is acting in that role now)

The device I'm working on uses BLE - it looks like the configure.ac always marks the bluetooth_le transport as being unsupported. 

What do you think is the easiest way to test / debug adding a new BLE device? I was hoping to use the simple dctool as a way to test things as I implemented it - but maybe there's a better approach? Do I need to build my own simple test app that sets up the ble connection and then hands things over to libdivecomputer? 

On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 4:32 AM Jef Driesen <jef@libdivecomputer.org> wrote:
On 6/05/2021 00:36, Ryan Gardner wrote:
> I'm hoping to add a new bluetooth dive computer to libdivecomputer. I've spent a
> fair amount of time reverse engineering the sync protocol between it and the
> android app that it uses, and have a general idea of how it communicates.
>
> I'm primarily on a mac - looking at the source for it, when I do my normal
> configure operation it claims:
>
> Transports:
>
> Serial: yes
> USB : yes
> USBHID: yes
> IrDA: no
> Bluetooth : no
> BLE : no
>
> It looks like it uses bluez or windows bluetooth apis - is there something I
> need to do to get it to work with bluetooth on OS X? I can work on an older
> linux machine as well - but it will take a bit longer to get it set up to do
> development on.

That's correct. Unfortunately libdivecomputer does not have a built-in bluetooth
transport on Mac. That's mainly because I'm not a Mac developer. I simply do not
have any experience with the Mac apis to write such a transport. For other
transports this wasn't a problem because the api is standard unix (serial) or
there are cross-platform libraries available (usb and usbhid).

Applications can always use a custom I/O implementation to work around this
limitation. That means implementing the low-level communication in the
application (using the native api for your platform), and wrap it inside a
libdivecomputer transport using dc_custom_open.

Does Mac supports serial port emulation? Because in that case you could also use
the serial transport, and let the OS take care of the bluetooth part.

Jef