7

I'm currently trying to develop a piece of software that would require to connect one bluetooth "classic" device and at least 2-3 Bluetooth Low Energy devices. And of course communicate with these devices, so it's not enough to be able to pair the devices but also to connect and communicate with them.

I'm using Nexus 4 (Android 4.3) as a unit which connects to these Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE devices.

Is this possible or is there some kind of restriction that only one, or the other, kind of Bluetooth devices can be connected simultaneously?

user2878083
  • 71
  • 1
  • 2

1 Answers1

1

I'm pretty sure there's no restriction in the Bluetooth standard for having both regular and LE connections at the same time (on the host side).

However, I think there may be a restriction on having both a regular and a LE connection to the same device at the same time. There's no reason to do that, though, as all the LE functionality is available through a regular Bluetooth connection on devices that have both abilities.

EDIT: You can restrict a device to not allow both LE and BR/EDR or you can also allow it. I'm not sure why you'd want to connect both on the same device, though.

Tim Tisdall
  • 9,914
  • 3
  • 52
  • 82
  • Ok, thanks for your reply. It's not the same device that I'm trying to simultaneously connect to with classic and BLE. One device is older so it can only use classic bluetooth and then there's two new sensors which are using BLE. And all these devices should connect to our Nexus 4.
    I think our problem was more related to the fact that we were using WiFi and Bluetooth connections simultaneously. It seems that those two don't co-operate too well.     – user2878083 Nov 07 '13 at 10:45
  • ah. yeah, I haven't come across that problem, but I've seen on wifi devices that they often have a mode to play nicely with bluetooth. I have no idea how that works, though. – Tim Tisdall Nov 07 '13 at 14:24
  • 1
    Nexus 4 is known for a bug effecting it's simultaneous WIFI and BLE use. I think that it is not any technical limitation just a bug that will probably be fixed with future updates. In general all apps I have tried and read about suggest turning off wifi when using BLE on Nexus 4, al-thou I think even disabling wifi scans would be enough. – Igor Čordaš Nov 12 '13 at 15:25
  • @PSIXO do you have a link for that bug? – ThomasW Apr 16 '15 at 02:50
  • @ThomasW This was a long time ago but I think it's this bug https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41631 – Igor Čordaš Apr 16 '15 at 12:07
  • is it possible to connect with both regular and ble to a single device and stream audio over regular and transfer data using ble on same device at same time. – Abhishek Sharma Sep 11 '17 at 06:01
  • @AbhishekSharma - I think I answered that. You might be able to, but it's pointless as the data can be transferred over regular bluetooth. – Tim Tisdall Sep 11 '17 at 12:58
  • @TimTisdall Is it possible to stream audio and be using the same (classic) connection to read/write other data at the same time? And wouldn't there be implementation issues, as normally the read/writes would be done via LE but this would have to be switched to classic during streaming? Or are you saying that in such cases classic should be used _always_? – User May 02 '19 at 17:45
  • @lxx - It's been a while since I touched this stuff, but my understanding is all BLE functionality is available through the "classic" connection (while "regular" Bluetooth functionality isn't available in BLE). So, if you wanted to do both GATT and audio streaming, you'd want to use a "classic" connection. – Tim Tisdall May 03 '19 at 17:56