Blackberry 10 network connectivity check - networking

I am looking for a snip of code in Blackberry 10 that my device is connected with n/w or not.

The official way is the Wi-Fi Service API, if you're familiar with C you should be good to go, look for any BPS tutorial/code online.
The unofficial and easier way is my class WifiWatcher from TheUnexposedAPIs, this project is a collection of easy-to-implement C++ classes that makes available all kind of internal objects from PPS (not to be confused with BPS).
You'll find an example of how to use it in QML in the project.

Related

Light Weight Bluetooth LE library in C

I have been looking around for a simple Bluetooth LE library in C that allows me to scan for BLE devices, connect and receive periodic notifications from a given service UUID from the BLE device. Something that directly works with Bluetooth sockets and libbluetooth(created from BlueZ) and not using DBUS. Pairing and security functionality are not required.
Came across https://github.com/labapart/gattlib. Appears to be good but uses dbus API and has dependency on libdbus, glib, so on. To use this library, there is an additional 5MB of libraries required, hence decided to go without dbus. We do not have space on our device to support 5MB of bluetooth stack on compressed rootfs image. The total size of our rootfs image is 9 MB. The bluetooth stack with dbus itself appears to be more than 50% of our rootfs size.
There is also - https://github.com/edrosten/libblepp which is in c++ and doesn't use dbus. This would require to write a C wrapper to be used in C programs and also overhead of C++ constructs such as compiler generated copy constructors, assignment operators and so on. Also issues in cross-compiling.
Target board is Xilinx Zynq running Linux and the build system is buildroot.
Please suggest.
Thanks
Found a solution, it may be of help for someone...
After searching and going through Linux Conference and IOT conference videos on youtube, figured that Bluez has light weight executables and the code is present in src/shared folder of Bluez. For btgattclient.c produces "gatt-client" executable when compiled which does the same functionality as "gatttool" and is not dependant on bluetoothd or dbus. The only dependency it has is on glib-2.0.
This is helpful if we need lightweight tools when the OS has no bluetoothd running or has no dbus library installed.
Thanks
If you want to use BlueZ for BLE communication, the only supported API is the D-Bus API. Everything else is either discouraged or deprecated.
If you want something more minimal and/or not use BlueZ at all, you can use the HCI_CHANNEL_USER feature in Linux to get raw access to the HCI connection in the kernel. With this you can use any Bluetooth Host stack software or write your own minimal if you only require an extremely small subset.
Questions asking for software library recommendations are not allowed on Stack Overflow due to the possibility for opinion-based results though.

Does the Qt MQTT package provide an easy way of writing my own broker?

I'm considering trying the MQTT implementation provided by Qt.
I've studied the documentation, the classes, the members of the classes, and the examples. Nowhere did I find anything indicating how to make my own broker.
All the examples, and all the classes and the available source code seem to be limited to creating a client. The examples use some online broker service to test this client.
So, does the Qt MQTT package provide an easy way of writing my own broker?
No, it is for clients. The overview pretty much says so
It enables applications to act as telemetry displays and devices to publish telemetry data.

How to customize BlueZ?

I will be asking a very subjective question, but it is important as I am looking to recover from failure to effectively use BlueZ programatically.
Basically I envision an IoT edge device that runs on a miniature computer (Ex: Raspberry pi or Intel Compute Stick). The device would then run AlpineLinux OS and interact with Cloud.
Since it is IoT environment, it is needless to mention the importance of Bluetooth BLE over ISM band. Hence the central importance of being able to customize and work with BlueZ.
I am looking to do several things with BlueZ BLE including but not limited to
Advertising
Pairing
Characteristic
Broadcast
Secure transport of data etc...
Since I will be needing full control over data, for data-processing and interacting with cloud (Edge AI or Data-science on Cloud) I am looking at three ways of using BlueZ:
Make DBus API calls to BlueZ Methods.
Modify BlueZ codebase and make install a custom bin.
(So that callback handlers can be registered and wealth of other bluez
methods can be invoked)
Invoke BlueZ using command line utils like hcitool/bluetoothctl inside a program using system() calls.
No 1 is where I have failed. It is exorbitant amount of effort to construct and export DBus objects and then to invoke BlueZ methods. Plus there is no guarantee that you will be able to take care of all BLE issues.
No 2 looks very promising and I want to fully explore how feasible it is to modify the BlueZ code to my needs.
No 3 is the least desirable option, but I want to have it as a fallback option nevertheless.
Given my problem statement, what is the most viable strategy forward? I am asking this aloud so that I do not make more missteps and cost myself time and efforts.
Your best strategy is to start with the second way (which you already found promising) as this is a viable solution and many developers go about this method in order to create their BlueZ programs. Here is what I would do:-
Write all the functionality of the system in some sort of flowchart or state machine. This helps you visualise your whole system and what needs to be done to reach your end goal.
Try to perform all the above functionality manually using bluetoothctl and btmgmt. This includes advertising, pairing, etc. I recommend steering away from legacy commands such as hcitool and hciconfig as these have been deprecated and have a very different code structure.
When stumbling upon something that is not the default in bluetoothctl/btmgmt or you want to tweak the functionality, update the source to do so.
Finally, once you manually get the system to perform the functionality that you need (it doesn't have to be all, it can just be a subset of the functions), you can move to automating the whole process. This involves modifying the source for bluetoothctl/btmgmt commands so that instead of manual intervention, everything would be event-driven.
This is a bonus, but if you can create automated tests using python or some other scripting language, then this would ensure that your system is robust and that previous functionality doesn't break when adding new ones.
By the end of this process, you'll have a much better understanding of the internals of bluetoothctl/btmgmt and D-BUS APIs that you might be able to completely detach your code from the original bluetoothctl/btmgmt or create the program from scratch.
You probably already know this, but when modifying the tools, this is the starting point for the source code:-
bluetoothctl - client/main.c
btmgmt - tools/btmgmt.c
For more references on using bluetoothctl commands and btmgmt, please see the links below:-
BlueZ D-Bus C or C++ Sample
Bluetoothctl set passkey
https://stackoverflow.com/a/51876272/2215147
Bluez Programming
Linux command line howto accept pairing for bluetooth device without pin
https://stackoverflow.com/a/52982329/2215147
Bluetooth Low Energy in C - using Bluez to create a GATT server
I hope this helps.

View available network shares

I would like to list all network shares but have no idea where to even begin my search, I assume that it has something to do with Samba etc., but really some guidance would be very useful.
I will be using Adobe AIR 2.5 - so I assume I have access to that sort of information, though I will be using the PlayBook from BlackBerry to access the network which has a full AIR implementation.
Thanks!
Network protocols like these are kind of out of the scope of Air. You could try to look into the Socket class and try to implement your own Network discovery protocol, but it would be extremely difficult to achieve the same kind of functionality as smb.

Recommendation for serial communications in Access 2007

I need to communicate with a bar code scanner connected over a serial port in Microsoft Access. In older versions of Access I was able to use a wrapper around MSCOMM32.ocx that no longer seems to work. I can't use wedge communication because I need to use ACK/NACK which is only supported through the RS232 interface and I need to send messages to the scanner, which is also only supported through the RS232 interface.
Are there any controls in widespread use that support serial communication in Access 2007?
EDIT: In case anyone comes across this, the newest version of MSCOMM32.ocx (I believe dated 3/09) still works fine as of this writing. It is older versions of MSCOMM32.ocx that do not work.
I can't vouch for the answer, but I can say that Tony Toews is a reliable person, and on this topic, he posted on his blog last year:
An older version of MSCOMM32.OCX has had the "kill bit" flag set.
As Tony says, it's almost always better to rely on Windows APIs than it is to build your app with connections to an ActiveX control. Windows APIs don't really have the versioning problems that ActiveX controls and OCX's do.

Resources