Re: Bluetooth device detection

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hey Nicolas,

On Tue, 2007-07-17 at 14:12 +0200, Nicolas Trangez wrote:
> Hija,
> 
> I'm working on a SoC project regarding HID device handling in the GNOME
> desktop. One of the targets is to make it easier to work with Bluetooth
> devices: not the ones which got a docking station and act like any
> normal USB device (there's no need to discover these, that "just
> works"), but devices which need a built-in BT adapter (like the Logitech
> Traveller I got here).
> 
> For these devices, you always need to discover them (at least) once, by
> pressing a button on them, then start some discovery software. Once this
> is done, the mouse will store the BT address of your machine and pair
> automagicly. At least, that's how I understood things.

Logitech adapters usually require using hid2hci, and we don't have the
hardware docs to make this just work. I posted about this a couple of
months ago on the bluez-devel list, check the archives on gmane.org.

> Now, there needs to be some place in our desktop where the user can
> start this discovery when he wants to add hardware. I was thinking about
> these possibilities:
> - An applet (or tray icon) with some "Discover Bluetooth hardware"
> action connected to it.
> 	Advantage: pretty easy to find the functionality as it's always on your
> screen.
> 	Disadvantage: pretty stupid to have a process for this and clutter your
> panel when you only use this function only once in a while (< once per
> month).

Which is why the wizard (see the wizard/ sub-dir in bluez-gnome) will be
integrated into the current Bluetooth applet (in bluez-gnome as well).

> - Add a "Discover new mouse" button to the gnome-mouse-properties
> capplet.
> 	Advantage: euh, dunno.
> 	Disadvantage: it's not the first place I would look for this
> functionality.

That would be nice, as it would allow both paths to the same result:
- I'm adding a mouse, therefore I look under mouse preferences
- I'm adding a Bluetooth device -> Bluetooth wizard

I suggest you implement what you think is needed in bluez-gnome's wizard
directly, such as a way to jump over the device type selection to go
directly to the mouse setup.

Same problem applies to Bluetooth keyboards btw.

<snip>
> Any thoughts on this, better sugestions,...?

Integrate in the already existing Bluetooth projects, in this case,
bluez-gnome. I don't think any of us want to maintain such a piece of
code on their own over a period of time. We've seen what happened with
libbtctl and gnome-bluetooth.

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>