Rhomobile, BLE112 Bluetooth device - iOS and android app

Question

I have been searching for a while now and decided to post a question here to see if someone had already traveled down this specific road.

• I am developing a bluetooth enabled device, using the Bluegiga BLE112 chip. They announce this chip to be easily used with iOS devices (and this was our main reason for choosing it)
• The device will need to communicate with an App, that we need to be developed for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Due to this need, I've decided to use Rhomobile, as it seems to be the only one that supports developing BT apps for iOS without having to develop further plugins.
• I only need to send small messages (like commands, small strings) and sometimes a bigger file to the device's internal memory.
• On Rhomobile's BT documentation, they state that for iOS it is only possible to comunicate between iOS devices ( i'm thinking that they say this because of the MiFi limitations imposed by Apple, but that using Bluegigas chip are not a problem...)

My question is:

Since Bluegiga's documentation has examples of devices communicating with iOS using their chip, i should be able to develop using Rhomobile and not suffer from the limitation stated above. I wanted to be as sure as possible before making my company spend money ordering the chips and development board and what not.. Has anyone tried this, is my thinking missing something?

Thank you all for your time.

Daniel

Answer 1

Good Question, I think I can understand the reason for your confusion. The main reason is many people/products/frameworks does not clearly mention if they are talking about Bluetooth Classic or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). These are both 2 different things and even thougfh they are called "Bluetooth" one cannot talk to the other. (Some devices can be both Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy, which allows it to connect to either types)

Ok now comming to your Question :

1. THE bluegiga dongle is BLE

2. The Rhomobile is refering to the Bluetooth Classic version of the API.

On iOS the BLE APIs are open to applications, but Classic is limited on iOS , one way for Apps to use Classic Bluetooth on iOS is via the Gamekit APIs but that is possible only when talking with iOS devices, so it wont connect to another Android or Win device that is also Classic. Needless to say with BLE APIs you cannot connect to calssic anyways.

The bluegiga examples are BLE examples, and apple also has good documentation and examples / samples on how to use BLE so yes it is easy to build a device and app using BLE on iOS. There is nothing special abut any particular chip yo ucan use any BLE chip - there are many vendors today.

BUT Android (and I guess Windows as well) does not yet have BLE APIs for applications to use :( (Bit I think is is comming soon :))

So I hope this clears things up a bit.