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I am currently trying to connect an iOS device and a raspberry pi (with wifi and bt dongles) into an ad-hoc network, but I am struggling. The two main ways to do that seem to be an ad-hoc wifi network or a bluetooth PAN, but:

  • There is no public API on iOS to create an ad-hoc wifi network
  • iOS7's Multipeer Connectivity Framework is apple-branded and non-iOS devices cannot connect
  • Using CoreBluetooth I can connect the pi and the iOS device and exchange data, but I need the devices to have an IP and be able to connect more than two devices, which does not seem possible

Now, since I am developing an internal application, I can use private APIs, so I hope that this can be achieved using those. So far I couldn't find much on that, though:

  • I cannot find the private framework responsible for Wi-Fi on iOS
  • Using BluetoothManager I can see other bluetooth devices and connect to them, but I couldn't find a way to create a BT PAN

So basically my question is if somebody knows something about how to get an iOS devices and a raspberry pi into an ad-hoc network, may that be wifi, wifi direct, bt or whatever.

BlackWolf
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1 Answers1

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Just to answer that: I have basically given up this approach. It seems the only way would be to use BluetoothManager and manually implement the BT PAN Profile (parse the incoming packets and respond accordingly).

It is possible, though, if the iOS device and the pi have been paired manually by the user and the personal hotspot is turned on the iOS device (the personal hotspot feature is actually Bluetooth PAN, so this creates a PAN). Using pand of the BlueZ bluetooth stack the pi can then join into the PAN of the iOS device. I haven't found an automatic way to do this purely programmatically, though.

BlackWolf
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