I had the dream to connect a Wii Remote controller with my web browser. The possibilities are infinite, playing games in the browser for example. Luckily Wii Remote controllers are using Bluetooth for the connection and there is already a group of developers on a possibility to connect Bluetooth devices with the Chrome web browser. With the help of How to get Chrome Web Bluetooth working on Linux from Alan C. Assis I was just one step away from reading the acceleration data of the controller via JavaScript, but unfortunately Web Bluetooth needs Bluetooth 4.0 or above. So this post is just about detecting the Bluetooth version of device with Linux.
AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA
and
my remote BD Address with BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB
in the following post.
We will start to detect the Bluetooth version of the local device, in my case a Thinkpad W520. Very helpful
for me was the command hciconfig
.
hciconfig -a
hci0: Type: BR/EDR Bus: USB
BD Address: AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA ACL MTU: 1021:8 SCO MTU: 64:1
UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN INQUIRY
RX bytes:1303 acl:0 sco:0 events:139 errors:0
TX bytes:1290 acl:0 sco:0 commands:86 errors:0
Features: 0xff 0xff 0x8f 0xfe 0x9b 0xff 0x79 0x87
Packet type: DM1 DM3 DM5 DH1 DH3 DH5 HV1 HV2 HV3
Link policy: RSWITCH HOLD SNIFF PARK
Link mode: SLAVE ACCEPT
Name: 'user-THINK'
Class: 0x00010c
Service Classes: Unspecified
Device Class: Computer, Laptop
HCI Version: 3.0 (0x5) Revision: 0x2ec
LMP Version: 3.0 (0x5) Subversion: 0x4203
Manufacturer: Broadcom Corporation (15)
The LMP Version is already saying that my notebook computer has only Bluetooth 3.0.
Very helpful for detecting remote devices was the command hcitool
. The following command shows all
connections.
hcitool con
Connections:
< ACL BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB handle 12 state 1 lm MASTER
The BD Address of the remote device is needed to find the Bluetooth version with the following command.
hcitool info BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB
Requesting information ...
BD Address: BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB
Device Name: Nintendo RVL-CNT-01-TR
LMP Version: 2.0 (0x3) LMP Subversion: 0x1d8d
Manufacturer: Cambridge Silicon Radio (10)
Features: 0xbc 0x02 0x04 0x38 0x08 0x00 0x00 0x00
<encryption> <slot offset> <timing accuracy> <role switch>
<sniff mode> <RSSI> <power control> <enhanced iscan>
<interlaced iscan> <interlaced pscan> <AFH cap. slave>
It seems to be impossible to connect a Wii Remote controller via Web Bluetooth to a web browser. A Wii Remote Plus controller is using Bluetooth 2.0 as you can see above.