A couple of questions about QBluetooth and QBluetoothZero

alexbottoni

It looks like Qt 5.0 is adding C++ Bluetooth support to Qt:

"Bluetooth Module":http://doc-snapshot.qt-project.org/5.0/qtbluetooth-overview.html
"Bluetooth C++ API":http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qt5/bluetooth-cpp.html

Of course, I'm very happy to see a proper C++, well-documented, professionally-supported library for Bluetooth but I still have a couple of doubts:

Is QBluetooth part of Qt 5.0 only (or is available in older versions as well)? I ask this because I'm working on a small 4.7 project and I would like to understand if I have to port the code to 5.0 in order to use it (it should not be a great problem, anyway)
Is QBluetooh available on all/most of the desktop platforms supported by Qt (or is it available only on mobile platforms)? I'm mainly interested in Linux, Windows and Mac desktops and tablets (the other end of the communication channel will be a Android phone).
Is QBluetooth to be considered stable and ready for production (or I had better wait a little bit...)?
What is "QBluetoothZero":https://projects.forum.nokia.com/qbluetooth? Well, I see that it is a third-party library for Windows and Symbian but... how is it related to QBluetooth? Isn't it overlapping with QBluetooth? What is the need for this second library?

Thanks

leon.anavi

[quote author="alexbottoni" date="1333031556"]

Is QBluetooth part of Qt 5.0 only (or is available in older versions as well)? I ask this because I'm working on a small 4.7 project and I would like to understand if I have to port the code to 5.0 in order to use it (it should not be a great problem, anyway)
[/quote]

According to the documentation "QBluetooth":http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qtmobility/qbluetooth.html namespace was introduced in Qt Mobility 1.2. Please make sure that you use appropriate version of Qt Mobility.

[quote author="alexbottoni" date="1333031556"]
2. Is QBluetooh available on all/most of the desktop platforms supported by Qt (or is it available only on mobile platforms)? I'm mainly interested in Linux, Windows and Mac desktops and tablets (the other end of the communication channel will be a Android phone).
[/quote]

According to the "documentation Connectivity (Bluetooth) at Qt Mobility 1.2":http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qtmobility/index.html is compatible with Symbian, Maemo 5, MeeGo Harmattan, MeeGo and Linux.

alexbottoni

Thanks for your reply, Leon.

Actually, QBluetooth seems to have been included in the Qt 5.0 qtconnectivity namespace as well:

"Qt 5.0 All namespaces":http://doc-snapshot.qt-project.org/5.0/namespaces.html

I had a look at the source code here:

"qtconnectivity submodule repository at GITorious":http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qtconnectivity

and, as long as I can understand, QBluetooth is just a (not very thin...) wrap around BlueZ (the official Bluetooth stack on Linux) so I'm almost sure it can be used on all Linux/Unix platforms (and maybe *BSD and Mac).

I had a second, deeper reading of the QBluetoothZero documentation and, as long as I can understand, again, BluetoothZero is a third-party library that existed before QBluetooth and that is now superseded by QBluettoth only on Linux. That is why it was renamed.

QBluetoothZero seems to still be the semi-official Qt module for Bluetooth on Windows and Symbian.

In any case, it would be interesting to hear a comment from the people who wrote this stuff.

leon.anavi

[quote author="alexbottoni" date="1333038240"]Thanks for your reply, Leon.

Actually, QBluetooth seems to have been included in the Qt 5.0 qtconnectivity namespace as well:

"Qt 5.0 All namespaces":http://doc-snapshot.qt-project.org/5.0/namespaces.html[/quote]

You are welcome. Thanks for providing information about Qt 5.0. It is nice that QBluetooth will be included to the main namespaces.

favoritas37

Hello alexbottoni,

sorry for being late but i just saw you post.

i have initially created QBluetoothZero and "Luis Valente":https://projects.developer.nokia.com/home/user/lpvalente helped me on the debugging process. The story is that i am just an independent developer and 2 and a half years ago QbluetoothZero (QBluetooth at that time) was developed for a Nokia's competition on Qt when Qt was first supported for Symbian. A couple of months later i uploaded it as a wiki article and later on it was live at Nokia's projects where it still is its home page.

At the time of its creation there was no other library handling the painfull Bluetooth operations, specially on Symbian where Symbian C++ native API was so ugly. I had the know-how and i was sure it would help lots of people so i decided to create it. This project gave me the opportunity to talk and support many people and i was happy about it.

At the time that QBluetooth was officially released i changed the name to avoid any conflicts. From that time and on developers started moving on to the official implementation so i suppose my part here has finished. But there are still a few things it supports that official QBluetooth doesn't.

Two things are the most important. First of all it can be used on devices older that Symbian^3. So for S60 3rd FP1, FP2 and S60 5th it is still the only option as far as i know. Secondly it supports Windows, where from what i can tell, there is no plan of being supported. Unfortunately i had to use Bluesoleil SDK for the backend implementation so everyone interested on using the Windows part has to install Bluesoleil drivers. I say unfortunately because the drivers are not for free...
But it was the easiest API and i was already familiar with it so...

To end up, i need to thank you very much for your good words by calling it "semi-official Qt module for Bluetooth". It makes me very happy to hear such words since i have no relation with Nokia or whatsoever (although i would love to ).

For any further information you are very welcomed to ask :)

monsingh

can you please tell me where i can get this "qbluetoothzero_windows.rar".
I have downloaded this from sourceforge.net site. there i don't see the prject file but i have the library file. There is no document for qbluetoothzero for windows. even i got some document there they didn't update the proper procedure.

Finally i tried to use that libray file QBluetoothZero.lib. while i compiling it shows the error message as follows

C:\Qt\Qt5.3.2\5.3\mingw482_32\include\QtCore\qmetatype.h:719: error: undefined reference to `imp___ZN10QBtAddressC1ERKS'

monsingh

can you please tell me where i can get this "qbluetoothzero_windows.rar".
I have downloaded this from sourceforge.net site. there i don't see the prject file but i have the library file. There is no document for qbluetoothzero for windows. even i got some document there they didn't update the proper procedure.

Finally i tried to use that libray file QBluetoothZero.lib. while i compiling it shows the error message as follows

C:\Qt\Qt5.3.2\5.3\mingw482_32\include\QtCore\qmetatype.h:719: error: undefined reference to `imp___ZN10QBtAddressC1ERKS'

favoritas37

Hello minsingh,

it has been a long time since i last checked the project, though i do remember that i have never tried to compile it with Mingw, only Visual Studio.

Nevertheless, I will check the procedure and all the downloadable files to make it better.

I will keep you updated.

BR

favoritas37

Hello minsingh,

it has been a long time since i last checked the project, though i do remember that i have never tried to compile it with Mingw, only Visual Studio.

Nevertheless, I will check the procedure and all the downloadable files to make it better.

I will keep you updated.

BR