Sending data via bluetooth between Android phone and laptop running OS X

Question

It seems like a relatively mundane task to make an app that can send data via bluetooth but I've been banging my head on this for the past few days so I'm looking for any ideas. I'm running OS X 10.10 and using a Nexus 5 Android device. Here's what I've tried so far:

I need a server program running on my laptop and I need a client-side android app running on my phone. However, (correct me if I'm wrong) the server program running on my computer needs to be able to access the Android Bluetooth API because I need to use the BluetoothServerSocket (based on the server-side code provided in Google's Android Bluetooth tutorial ).

Since it's server-side code, I need to run it on a server so I built a Java Servlet which I ran from inside Eclipse but I didn't know how to access the Android API from inside a dynamic web application.

So I started following this approach where the Bluecove library made that possible: http://luugiathuy.com/2011/02/android-java-bluetooth/

I tried getting Bluecove to work with OS X but there are a whole host of issues involved with that. I found some workarounds and then got an error dealing with the IOBluetoothLocalDeviceReadSupportedFeatures device that Apple removed in its later OS versions (but Bluecove depended on it).

I found a fix here that installed the old IOBluetooth library and changed the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to it. Unfortunately, this had no effect (I don't know if I changed the library path properly...I followed the instructions from Solution 1 in the answer from this post).

In any event, I feel like I'm overcomplicating this task and am looking for any guidance - in terms of overall approach or a specific thing I missed. The primary issue is accessing the Android Bluetooth API inside the server program intended to run on my laptop.

Answer 1

I eventually ended up using WiFi to send data since there was better software support for that.

But if someone wants to pursue the Bluetooth path, one possibility is to run OS X Lion (which had the IOBluetooth library) as a VM and run the server-side Bluecove code on the VM. This would require a separate Bluetooth USB dongle to be attached because the VM can't access the bluetooth hardware of its host machine - there may be a way but by default it can't access the in-built bluetooth hardware.

Not an ideal solution but I don't know if there is much choice until Bluecove releases a version that is supported on recent OS versions.