Windows 8.1 Bluetooth Low Energy Behavior

Question

I'm looking into programming Bluetooh Low Energy on Windows 8.1 and have a few questions about its behavior on auto-reconnecting to BLE devices after the connection is termiated:

1. How long will this auto-reconnect feature timed out? Or is it as long as you subscribe to BLE notifications and attempt to read/write data to it?

2. Will it reconnect if I restart Windows and my application?

3. How many devices can Windows remember to reconnect? Is it as many as the number of devices my app can connect to?

Answer 1

1. Where did you read about auto-connecting algorithm for Bluetooth devices in Windows 8.1. As far as I know, it is not possible to perform any kind of auto-connection, so all connection establishment has to be done manually in Windows 8.1 Bluetooth settings.

2. If your device is in connected state and you restart your PC for some reason, it will still show your device in the list but as "Not Connected" state. So you manually have to remove the device, and then pair it again.

3. I made a test, where I connected to two devices and read notifications from them both at the same time. What do you mean by app ?. A Smartphone application or ?.

All in all there is a lack of efficiency using Windows 8.1 for BLE applications, since all scanning and connection establishment functionalities have to be done in Windows 8.1 settings rather than in your Windows application, which restricts some important algorithms like auto-connection based on RSSI values and so on.