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A comment on Ask HN: Building Bluetooth web applications for health monitors.

Re:Ask HN: Building Bluetooth web applications for health mo... by sqrtc on Saturday March 18, 2023 @10:49AM (#35209537)
I think if you’re planning on using this for personal use, and willing to accept the (slight) inconveniences associated with it, then this is likely very possible. Note that you’ll likely only be allowed to use the Bluetooth API in secure context, so HTTPS rather than file://[0]. I point this out as you’ve said a simple HTML page.

I recently built an application involving BLE (although not in a browser), and was quite surprised by how straightforward it can be. I’d recommend O’Riley’s Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy[1] as a quick skim to understand the core BLE concepts.

If you’re unsure how your device’s services and characteristics are set up, then using a decent inspector app is good if you’re trying to reverse engineer the values, I recommend BT Inspector[2] but unfortunately it’s iOS/MacOS only.

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/articles/bluetooth/#https-only

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/getting-started-with/97...

[2] https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/bluetooth-inspector/id15090850...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Building Bluetooth web applications for health mo... by onepaulmbw on Saturday March 18, 2023 @11:33AM (#35209907)
Hey sqrtc! Thanks for your response. I do intend on building something much larger than for my personal use, but having looked into it more it feels like the security risks are not worth the effort. I also understand the API is only available on Chrome (as other browsers such as Firefox have explicitly said they won't be supporting this). I'll play around with the react-native-ble-manager library and see what I can build. Thank you!
[ Parent | on HN ]