When I learned about the Raspberry Pi 3 with its integrated Bluetooth 4 capabilities I got instantly excited. I find Bluetooth LE (BLE) very fascinating. It allows to spread sensor data and similar information in a very easy and standardized way. I got a board and started playing around. It turned out that the current system integration still needs some [work]. Since I’m a Java developer I wanted to do some project using Java to communicate with the physical world. My idea is to write a gateway collecting data from sensor nodes which send their information by using GATT profiles. A web application hosted by the Raspberry Pi connects to the server application by using web sockets to retrieve and display sensor values and updates. This project is more like a proof-of-concept to play with the various technologies and figure out how and if they are working together.
Unfortunately also there is an implementation for [Python] there is no such thing for Java except some older projects that even don’t cover BLE (e.g. [JBlueZ]). Also the underlying Bluetooth stack [bluez] seems to be hard to utilize when developing Bluetooth software.
With Pi4J a great Java library for accessing the GPIO hardware already exists. I’m thinking that we need something similar to access Bluetooth LE stack on the Raspberry Pi. I have done C and some JNI coding in the past and I’m looking into implementing some kind of Java library/framework for this purpose.
To begin with I set up a remote development environment using Netbeans so I’m able to develop the JNI part in C/C++ on my Mac and I’ve been able to setup a Hello World project.
There is a good tutorial on the netbeans site. I wish I could use an IDE from my favorite vendor which is [JetBrains](http://jet brains.com). Maybe Lion will eventually also be able to provide remote development capabilities like Netbeans does.
I think with the Raspberry Pi 3 BLE will gain even more importance in the creator world and it’s worth the effort.
Any ideas and help is appreciated.