I will want to create a remote UI on a tablet for controlling DSP running on Bela. That means either Wifi or BLE AFAIK. I've done BLE programming on iOS, and would prefer this route, but I'm guessing I'll be swimming upstream with this approach. In any case I would need a USB wireless dongle and drivers.

Based on searching this forum, I'm guessing the path most travelled would be Wifi as in this thread:

https://forum.bela.io/d/200-beaglebone-black-wireless/37

I'm really curious as to the best option.

5 months later

I have finally gotten a BLE MIDI footswitch to talk to Bela, but it involved some hacking. I had to build a newer version of bluetoothd than is included, and I had to set up some interconnections between midi ports using aconnect.

This is the bluetooth dongle I used: Plugable USB Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy Micro Adapter (available on Amazon). I found a tutorial for making that work on Raspberry Pi, and adapted that to Bela.

Thanks for sharing your results, do you have the process documented anywhere? That'd be great if you could share it, please.

Happy to do that, but I want to see if I can make the process easier first. Building the bluez stack from source was really hairy. I had to hack up the configure script that autoconf generated, to skip a couple tests and hardcode some paths to libraries ... that kind of thing shouldn't be necessary, but I couldn't figure out a way around it.

I gather that Debian has an official way to backport a package, but I ran into problems with that some point. If you have any special knowledge of how to backport the bluez v5.50 package from Buster to Stretch, that would be really empowering for BLE MIDI on Bela. (Bela currently runs bluez v5.43, but MIDI support was only added in v5.44 ...)

The end result of all that hacking was to build a replacement for the stock bluetoothd, that detects BLE MIDI devices. I can certainly post that binary, if there's an appropriate place for it. I don't think any other part of the bluez package needs to be modified/upgraded, besides that one daemon.

But after that, I still am unsure of the best way to get a Bela program to choose that particular MIDI device. I posted that question in another thread. =)

3 years later

Hi, I was wondering if this problem of using BLE has been progressed/solved anywhere? I am using the Bela with a university project which requires remote control: I have got WIFI working fine but would be really nice to have both options.

If anyone's found a straightforward way I'd be very interested, thanks.

The only experience I have with BLE on Bela is using an external module that acts as a transparent BLE-to-UART interface, but I appreciate this may not meet all use cases.