Finding Bluetooth low energy with python
As I said in the comment, that library won't work with BLE.
Here's some example code to do a simple BLE scan:
import sys
import os
import struct
from ctypes import (CDLL, get_errno)
from ctypes.util import find_library
from socket import (
socket,
AF_BLUETOOTH,
SOCK_RAW,
BTPROTO_HCI,
SOL_HCI,
HCI_FILTER,
)
if not os.geteuid() == 0:
sys.exit("script only works as root")
btlib = find_library("bluetooth")
if not btlib:
raise Exception(
"Can't find required bluetooth libraries"
" (need to install bluez)"
)
bluez = CDLL(btlib, use_errno=True)
dev_id = bluez.hci_get_route(None)
sock = socket(AF_BLUETOOTH, SOCK_RAW, BTPROTO_HCI)
sock.bind((dev_id,))
err = bluez.hci_le_set_scan_parameters(sock.fileno(), 0, 0x10, 0x10, 0, 0, 1000);
if err < 0:
raise Exception("Set scan parameters failed")
# occurs when scanning is still enabled from previous call
# allows LE advertising events
hci_filter = struct.pack(
"<IQH",
0x00000010,
0x4000000000000000,
0
)
sock.setsockopt(SOL_HCI, HCI_FILTER, hci_filter)
err = bluez.hci_le_set_scan_enable(
sock.fileno(),
1, # 1 - turn on; 0 - turn off
0, # 0-filtering disabled, 1-filter out duplicates
1000 # timeout
)
if err < 0:
errnum = get_errno()
raise Exception("{} {}".format(
errno.errorcode[errnum],
os.strerror(errnum)
))
while True:
data = sock.recv(1024)
# print bluetooth address from LE Advert. packet
print(':'.join("{0:02x}".format(x) for x in data[12:6:-1]))
I had to piece all of that together by looking at the hcitool
and gatttool
source code that comes with Bluez. The code is completely dependent on libbluetooth-dev
so you'll have to make sure you have that installed first.
A better way would be to use dbus to make calls to bluetoothd
, but I haven't had a chance to research that yet. Also, the dbus interface is limited in what you can do with a BLE connection after you make one.
EDIT:
Martin Tramšak pointed out that in Python 2 you need to change the last line to print(':'.join("{0:02x}".format(ord(x)) for x in data[12:6:-1]))
You could also try pygattlib. It can be used to discover devices, and (currently) there is a basic support for reading/writing characteristics. No RSSI for now.
You could discover using the following snippet:
from gattlib import DiscoveryService
service = DiscoveryService("hci0")
devices = service.discover(2)
DiscoveryService
accepts the name of the device, and the method discover
accepts a timeout (in seconds) for waiting responses. devices
is a dictionary, with BL address as keys, and names as values.
pygattlib is packaged for Debian (or Ubuntu), and also available as a pip package.