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Bluetooth

Nzyme has an experimental Bluetooth subsystem since version alpha.14. It is not clear what exactly this functionality will develop into, but we invite you to try it out.

Current State

At this time, the Bluetooth functionality in nzyme is only displaying discovered devices in range of your nzyme taps. The goal in this early state is to ensure that the underlying data collection engine works.

Limitations

  • Nzyme does not yet perform any device interrogation and presented details of discovered devices may be limited.
  • The alerting and analysis functionality around Bluetooth devices is extremely limited.

Required Hardware

The Bluetooth subsystem will work with any Bluetooth chipset supported by Linux. Most onboard chipsets and USB adapters should work fine. It should be noted that the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 on-board Bluetooth chips appear to work perfectly.

Configuration

Start by identifying the name of your local Bluetooth devices by running hciconfig:

hci0:   Type: Primary  Bus: USB
    BD Address: E0:D0:45:3C:BE:EF  ACL MTU: 1021:4  SCO MTU: 96:6
    UP RUNNING 
    RX bytes:7224491 acl:0 sco:0 events:165265 errors:0
    TX bytes:887014 acl:0 sco:0 commands:13763 errors:0

In this case, we have one adapter and it is called hci0.

Add it to the nzyme-tap configuration like this: (Note the hci0 part in the section title)

[bluetooth_interfaces.hci0]
active = true
bt_classic_enabled = true
bt_le_enabled = true
discovery_period_seconds = 30
dbus_method_call_timeout_seconds = 2

You can add multiple Bluetooth devices, and, for example, have one device scan Bluetooth Classic (bt_classic_enabled), while the other device only scans Bluetooth Low Energy (bt_le_enabled). This would cut discovery time (discovery_period_seconds) in half, because it is applied per Bluetooth type.

Warning

Make sure that the Bluetooth device you select does not have any devices paired to it. Nzyme will have trouble discovering devices if a device is already paired to the underlying Bluetooth subsystems of your operating system. The nzyme-tap process will print warnings in the local log if it detects paired devices.