Is there a way to build with bluetooth support on a mac?

[Jef Driesen]

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