Mkr 1010 BLE connect to PC and stream sensor data.

Official Hardware MKR Family MKR WiFi 1010
1

I'm struggling to get my Mkr WiFi 1010 to connect to my PC via bluetooth and stream sensor data to it. Here's where I am so far:

I've followed the directions on the element14 site to upgrade my arduinos to enable bluetooth. The firmware update was sucessful, and I downloaded the ArduinoBLE library to my IDE. When I upload one of the example sketches to the board I can see the bluetooth device from my PC. But I don't have a Raspberry Pi, so the rest of the tutorial is not that useful to me. I'm trying to connect to a PC, not a Pi anyway.

Unfortunately I'm not finding any documentation on the ArduinoBLE library, so I'm completely blind as to what commands I need to use to control the bluetooth on the Mkr WiFi 1010. All I can do is read example sketches and try to discern what commands may or may not work. The most helpful example I've found is one on Github because the program is supposed to do almost exactly what I want. It's just using a different sensor. When I run that sketch I can see the bluetooth device from my PC but I can't get them to pair. I've also tried pairing to my android phone but like the PC is hangs for a while on "Pairing..." then errors out.

How do I get my PC to pair with the Mkr WiFi 1010?
Once I do get them to pair, how do I see the data on the PC that the Arduino is supposed to be sending? My eventual destination for the data is Either Touch Designer or Unity, but at the moment I just want to see the raw sensor data streaming in a terminal or something like that.
Is there any documentation on the ArduinoBLE library that lists all the commands and tells what they do?

2

I am searching for the same question.

Thanks in advance,
Cesar.

3

So, I don't know if this helps or not. I'm new to BLE and MKR (and a lot of other things), so take what I say with a grain of salt... but I did just get some BLE basics up and running (after digging for a bit; I wouldn't say the whole thing was exactly "plug and play").

First, some links I found helpful...

The ArduinoBLE description had some good terminology in it (central vs peripheral):

What I'll say there (at least my understanding) is that BLE does not equal Bluetooth "classic"! From what I can tell, the MKR WiFi 1010 does support both, but it sounds like (?) there are no drivers out there yet for classic Bluetooth... just BLE. So, that's what you've got at hand.

Also, from what I can tell (again, I hope people correct me where I'm wrong), there really is no concept of "pairing" in BLE. It's intended to be much more lightweight and somewhat "ephemeral" (maybe is the right word) than that. It's more about a peripheral (your Arduino) doing reads/writes on what are called characteristics within services offered. That took me a while to wrap my head around. Still not sure I'm completely in tune with it... and took some code to finally get things to cooperate.

On the user-facing side, I was playing with MIT App Inventor (first time playing with that). If you want to give that a try, note that you're NOT interested in their Bluetooth Server or Client modules. That's for classic Bluetooth, not BLE... as I found out after playing for too long. You want the BluetoothLE extension (which you have to import into your project).

This has some good reference about it:
http://iot.appinventor.mit.edu/#/bluetoothle/bluetoothleintro

I found this tutorial to be a very helpful starting point (to get connected):
http://iot.appinventor.mit.edu/assets/tutorials/MIT_App_Inventor_Basic_Connection.pdf

One more thing I found useful (before digging into MIT App Inventor)...

There's an app called LightBlue with was helpful to show signs of life. It's basically a pretty basic BLE interface (on your phone) to your Arduino. You might want to start there to verify the Arduino side of things. Note the connect/disconnect concept, rather than "pairing".

Also, I should have mentioned that my starting point on the Arduino side of the fence was the LED example for the ArduinoBLE library. I found it to be a very helpful starting point to play with... basically blink the on-board LED. If you want to run it somewhat more standalone, you can just comment out the line of code that waits for the serial monitor to connect.

Hope that helps. Like I said, I'm not an expect... but I know more than I did a few days ago (and a bunch of digging around).

4

Here are some leadings to help with BLE (not really same "pairing" as BlueTooth but it's realy a different concept of nearby devices comunication

http://www.geothread.net/arduino-making-a-simple-bluetooth-data-logger/

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/8bitkick/sensor-data-streaming-with-arduino-683a6c