Your experience with Bluetooth HID on the Bangle?

Posted on Sun 10th, January 2021

• #1

Sebastian

Hello all,

I have been experimenting with using the Bangle as an HID keyboard, based on the Bluetooth / Binary Bluetooth Keyboard apps, but I find it to be extremely unstable to the point of being unusable.

In the best case it works for a minute or so, with some lag between pushing buttons, but more often than not it will either not register buttons at all, or only after a few seconds, sometimes repeating them several times. Also sooner or later I get disconnects when using HID keys. First I thought it was a spotty Bluetooth driver implementation on Linux, but it behaves the same on my Windows work PC.

I am using a Plugable Bluetooth adapter with BCM chipset on a Linux 18.04 machine with BlueZ 5.48. I am sitting right next to the dongle when testing, and when programming the Bangle it seems to be quite stable usually.

So what are your experiences with HID over Bluetooth? Is this behaviour common?
• #2

Gordon

Are you running up to date firmware on Bangle.js? I know early firmwares (before 2v07) did have some issues with Bluetooth LE HID stability, but I was pretty sure those were sorted now.
• #3

Sebastian in reply to @Gordon

Yes, I have 2v08 on it.

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