Bluetooth 5 Specification Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Bluetooth 5 Specification Released

The Bluetooth SIG today announced the core specification release for Bluetooth 5...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Bluetooth-5-Released

[Happy Heyoka]

A slightly more informative link:

https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/adopted-specifications

interesting to see just how many profiles they have now hanging off the GATT stuff, glad I don't have to write code to support all that

[ElectricPrism]

Now if only the 4 Dual Shock 4 Controllers I bought would connect via Bluetooth and authenticate consistently as P1 to P4 that would be super.

[computerquip]

Now if only the 4 Dual Shock 4 Controllers I bought would connect via Bluetooth and authenticate consistently as P1 to P4 that would be super.

I haven't had a problem with Linux handling multiple controllers. That said, the latency for Bluetooth on Linux (Broadcom) is just pitiful. I tried playing a casual game of Rocket League but there were seconds of latency.

On Windows, most games expect XInput and you have to use something like InputMapper or DS4Windows. DS4Windows uses a rather buggy software called "SCP Driver Package". It crashes constantly, may not detect a controller correctly, and definitely doesn't unload controllers correctly. It's the closest thing to an open-source alternative. The best driver for now is provided by InputMapper... although it too randomly crashes and I've actually had bad experiences where it causes my USB storage device to randomly disconnect, which coincidentally is detected by the driver meant for DS4 controllers... not sure wtf is going on ther.

That said, the controllers will connect and work as intended... if the driver doesn't crash.

I think there needs to be an alternative standard to Bluetooth meant for low-latency, energy efficient devices, both of which Bluetooth seems to be bad at. I've sadly had better experiences with Xbox controllers, even on Linux.

[liam]

I haven't had a problem with Linux handling multiple controllers. That said, the latency for Bluetooth on Linux (Broadcom) is just pitiful. I tried playing a casual game of Rocket League but there were seconds of latency.

On Windows, most games expect XInput and you have to use something like InputMapper or DS4Windows. DS4Windows uses a rather buggy software called "SCP Driver Package". It crashes constantly, may not detect a controller correctly, and definitely doesn't unload controllers correctly. It's the closest thing to an open-source alternative. The best driver for now is provided by InputMapper... although it too randomly crashes and I've actually had bad experiences where it causes my USB storage device to randomly disconnect, which coincidentally is detected by the driver meant for DS4 controllers... not sure wtf is going on ther.

That said, the controllers will connect and work as intended... if the driver doesn't crash.

I think there needs to be an alternative standard to Bluetooth meant for low-latency, energy efficient devices, both of which Bluetooth seems to be bad at. I've sadly had better experiences with Xbox controllers, even on Linux.

BLE (specifically, HOGP) exactly what you want. It's designed to build up and teardown its network stack within a few milliseconds (and transmit a small amount of data while the network is functioning).

https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?doc_id=245141

[rastersoft]

interesting to see just how many profiles they have now hanging off the GATT stuff, glad I don't have to write code to support all that

GATT is quite easy to support, it's just a kind of object-oriented system. You have "services", that are like objects or interfaces, and "characteristics", that are properties of the services, and you just read them.