Is the BlueZ stack present on Vera?
–Richard
No
What is the blue Zstack
It’s a way to get some of the Bluetooth underpinnings in place at the OS level. Other pieces would be needed atop it, but it would lead to being able to write Plugins to say, let Vera control a PS3 over it’s BT iface, or send directly SMS via phones within reach of Vera (etc), or “borrow” their Network stack from time to time.
In other words, a set of Bluetooth libraries for Linux.
So my question was mostly curiosity. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, “I have a scheme”…
Several folks have discussed ways to detect “homeness”. My SO and I both have iPhones, and the periodic ping thing looked promising–but doesn’t work once the phones go to sleep. They’ll respond to pings as long as they’re connected to power, but when they’re not, they drop off pretty fast.
However, their BT radios, as these things have to do, wake up and check for contact frequently. Folks have made quite a few “presence” monitors based on this: Proximity for the Mac, BlueProximity for Linux and friends. I have verified that if the phone is on and in range, this works. So I am getting a class 1 USB dongle to extend the range enough to make this fly. We have servers that are on 24/7 in the house, and I can just plug it in to one of them and have it do a periodic sdptool scan for the BTADDRs for the two phones. And can then figure out some way to weasel the status over to Vera. If Vera had BlueZ–well, that would have been simpler. No big deal.
Side note–after I got this much of this worked out, Linda informed me that it still might not work, since her iPhone gets left in her purse for days at a time and sometimes conks out. So for her, plan B is to pick up a Kensington K33368 Ipod charging cable, a USB A female to mini-USB male adapter, and a cheapo BT headset that charges off mini-USB. She has an iPod connection cable in her glovebox already, which is powered any time the car is on. The intent of the Kensington cable is to put power into the docking connector, but hell, it’s just wiring. So I will be taking power out of the docking connector to keep the headset reasonably charged up. Since it’ll never be doing anything but “standby”, it should be good for close to a week between charges. She’ll still be able to plug her iPod in when she wants to. I just need to make sure the headset I get doesn’t power itself off if it’s not connected to anything for a while.
Rube Goldberg, step aside!
–Richard
With some experimentation, you may be able to get the OpenWRT ipk’s to load. Others have done it “by hand” as that part of the OpenWRT distro seems (strangely) broken on Vera. At least the UI-based package loader is.
If you’re feeling handy, look up the instructions (posted elsewhere) to do it manually, and see if you can apply the same logic to the bluez ipk’s (including tools)
Just be aware that it’s a long road, since the start isn’t “automatic” (in any sense of the word)
@guessed, no need to manually handle IPKs. Vera’s OpenWRT distro is not broken, just slightly outdated. I posted a Wiki article detailing the differences and how to fix them easily:
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=2954.msg12295#msg12295
http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/OpenWRT
@rlmalisz, since you have a PC working 24/7, you may find it easier to setup/experiment with bluetooth proximity sensors there. It should be also possible to do it with OpenWRT on Vera, but maybe more difficult, especially considering how little space is left available to install additional libraries and apps. Although, you can mount an extra storage through USB thumbdrive…
@denix, my point is that a “normal” OpenWRT distro ships with a consistent set of configuration files, including not only “where” to load more ipk’s from, but where to put them when you do (and when they’re installed)
Vera doesn’t ship this in a consistent state, as your Wiki has nicely documented (thanks for that). I consider that “broken”, since I cannot use the standard (?) OpenWRT UI to do the actions it advertises… and of course OpenWRT silently fails when you do.
BTW, the bluez libs didn’t look that big, am I missing something? It seems like a generally useful feature to have, not one that you’d want to tie to a PC as others probably wont be able to do the same.
Separately, it’s also another reason why I would not run Vera as my Primary Router. That functionality within Vera’s OpenWRT is simply not being maintained with the latest lines, which can lead to all sorts of fun if Security problems occur (although OpenWRT is fairly good OOBox)