Bluetooth LE on Raspbian

Question

I installed bluez-5.15 from source with the following configuration:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --sysconfdir=/etc \\
--localstatedir         


        

Answer 1

From my experience with Bluez 5.15

1. Ensure you have no connections to the BLE device (check with hcitool con).
2. Do not run hcitool lecc.
3. Start gatttool like in your question.
4. In gatttool run connect command. If the command hangs, then press button on the device (i.e. sometimes needed when connecting to SensorTag).

I believe earlier versions of Bluez required hcitool lecc step, but it is not the case anymore.

Answer 2

First off, I spoke with a colleague about my configuration and for Raspbian (or more specifically, Debian) he recommended the following configuration settings:

./configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --enable-library --with-systemdsystemunitdir=/lib/systemd/system --with-systemduserunitdir=/usr/lib/systemd

Afterward, upon further inspection, here is how I was able to successfully connect. So what was happening was that the device I was trying to connect to (an NRF-based BLE device) required the LE address flag to be set to 'random'. See below:

gatttool -t random -b EA:FB:B5:CE:B0:13 -I

Then the result:

[EA:FB:B5:CE:B0:13][LE]> connect
Attempting to connect to EA:FB:B5:CE:B0:13
Connection successful
[EA:FB:B5:CE:B0:13][LE]> characteristics
handle: 0x0002, char properties: 0x0a, char value handle: 0x0003, uuid: 00002a00
-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb

Huzzah! Also, there may be a need to set the security level to something lower than high:

[EA:FB:B5:CE:B0:13][LE]> sec-level medium