Peripheral Pairing & Bonding Support and adapter status - desktop 🔗🛡️

[mpiffari]

Hi Kable team/community 👋,

I wanted to ask about potential future plans or existing work regarding pairing and bonding functionality and ble adapter status in Kable, mainly for desktop platforms.

Specifically:

• getPeripheralPaired status from the BLE adapter 🟢❌
• isPaired state for each peripheral during scanning or after connection 📡
• Eventual bonding handling support, similar to TinyB (e.g., BluetoothAdapter) 🔒
• ble adapter status (if it is powered on, powered off or if any permissions are required)

These features would be really useful for apps that need to manage trusted devices and maintain persistent secure connections.

Are there any plans, designs, or discussions around this area?
If community contributions are welcome, is there a recommended direction or API shape you’d envision for pairing/bonding support? 🤔

Thanks for your time and for the excellent work on Kable! 🙏

[twyatt]

future plans or existing work regarding pairing and bonding functionality

There has been numerous attempts to implement support for bonding, discussion can be found in #111.

Ultimately, I didn't have a device available that supported bonding to test against; so I've decided to take the much longer approach and implement the server side of GATT (#51) to be able to properly test any bonding implementation.

I've been super busy with work projects, so haven't been able to dedicate a lot of time to Kable lately, but I'm hoping with the various winter holidays ahead, that I'll be able to to dive back into it. 🤞

is there a recommended direction or API shape you’d envision for pairing/bonding support

No real solid plans for the API yet — as I understand it, bonding is mostly implicit, so I'm hopeful it will have a small API surface; but we'll know more what it should look like as implementation progresses.

[mpiffari]

Here’s an improved and more polished version of your message — clear, natural, and professional while keeping your friendly tone:

Thank you for your response and for sharing the roadmap and future plans.

I have another question related to BLE peripheral pairing:
Is there a way, using Kable, to retrieve the list of BLE peripherals already paired on the PC and to check the status of the BLE chip (e.g., whether it’s powered on or off - like a way to look in settings and check the list of known peripherals)?

Did you take in consideration some BLE dev kit such as Nordic/SiLabs/NXP in order to test the pairing/bonding features?

Thank you again for your help!

[twyatt]

Is there a way, using Kable, to retrieve the list of BLE peripherals already paired on the PC

Not using Kable, no. Any peripherals consumers use w/ Kable, it is the consumer's responsibility to manage/track. As for something equivalent to being able to ask Android for all known peripherals: there also isn't a similar API provided by Kable. This is mostly due to the fact that there isn't a good overlap of available APIs to query that information on each platform. On Android, you can query all "known" peripherals, whereas on iOS you can query connected peripherals based on a UUID filter. On Webapp, I'm not aware of a similar API that is commonly available on popular browsers. This makes it very difficult for Kable to provide a unified API for such functionality.

check the status of the BLE chip

This functionality does exist (Bluetooth.availability), but it is being removed in the next version; see #737 for the discussion as to why it is being removed.

Did you take in consideration some BLE dev kit such as Nordic/SiLabs/NXP in order to test the pairing/bonding features?

I would gladly purchase most any BLE hardware that had firmware I could either easily modify for testing bonding support, or that provided bonding support out-of-the-box with good BLE documentation (see #111 for the numerous attempts against different hardware I have tried). As far as I have seen (of the manufacturers you mentioned) they would all have a very long ramp up of having to learn their APIs/tooling. If you can point me to something easy/helpful for testing bonding then I'd love to give it a try. In the mean time, #51 seemed like a good way to both provide functionality that the community wanted and to eventually provide something to test against for bonding.