Challenge
The BLE device was developed in Denmark whereas an abroad consulting company was hired to design the mobile app. The difference in development focus areas and speed quickly came to show giving multi and conflicting priorities. The solution was to design a BLE tool that could be inserted ‘in the loop’, that could work as a both simulator and stimulator to test either the mobile app or the BLE device. For easy rollout and able to run in multiple instances, a Win 10 PC was selected as platform, utilizing the build-in BLE communication device.
Solution
Since the customers BLE device was a proprietary device, with special encoded byte protocol, the application would have to access the ‘raw’ Win10 Bluetooth interface.
The solution was a Visual Studio UWP application using a Bluetooth 4.2, and code written in C#.
The application was extended with macros for user designed byte stream, using build in function for checksum and byte stream encoding. This helped the software developers to easily test their implementation of the different telegrams.
A special build of the application core would later be converted to a service, in a production test setup, each controlling BLE devices for automatic testing of new firmware releases.
