Bluetooth blues

Geek Speak

Obviously been one of those days…

I was woken before 7 this morning as Miche rushed back to work - always a bad sign when people take a wash bag with them; she’s still not home… :( I was going to go back to sleep, but, well, I was awake and thought that perhaps I’d have a doze later. No such luck…

A day of merging, building and integration. Mixed in with a spot of driver updating for the TDK USB Bluetooth dongle that I have.

The good news is that the new version of the driver (1.3.2.19) is much better - it hasn’t crashed my dual xeon dev box once today whereas the previous version has been the only thing that’s caused this XP box to blue screen… The old version worked fine on my laptop - single processor == less hard for multi-threading…

The bad news is…

  1. It’s still really unnecessarilly hard to get the PC acting as an access point for my IPAQ. The only way I could get it to work was to enable ICS on my lan connection and then all manner of other things stopped working. Manually setting up the Bluetooth network adapter to route to the lan adapter didn’t seem to work - but then it did take me a while to work out that the Bluetooth adapter needed a reboot between TCP/IP setting changes…

  2. It doesn’t support the Microsoft idea of being an XP SP1 “compatible” Bluetooth driver. I didn’t quite realise that when I decided to dig through my recent MSDN disks and update the Platform SDK on my dev boxes so that I could have a play with the new XP SP1 Bluetooth support…

What’s worse is that even with the right version of the Platform SDK installed you still can’t build Bluetooth enabled software without a software update that only comes with Microsoft compatible Bluetooth hardware… And try finding a list of compatible hardware… So that stops me mucking around writing a C++ wrapper to the API whilst waiting for an updated driver…

So that was all a bit of a waste of time… Which is a pity, because it would be nice to be able to play around with this stuff without having to get hold of the Widcomm development kit, and I don’t think I’m interested enough, just yet…