I’m really excited about these devices, but very curious if HID support or what level of bluetooth support will be exposed.
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Cross-posting for consistency:
We generally try to be thoughtful about which features we add to our Device OS because more features means more flash and RAM used by the system and less resources available to your application. Since the primary role of Bluetooth in Particle Mesh is for device setup and diagnostics, we don’t plan to support generalized and broad Bluetooth functionality when we ship.
Can you share a specific use case for HID or other bluetooth profiles? FWIW, we're considering using Nordic's BLE uart for the low-level device setup and diagnostic primitive.
Specifically, Mouse and Keyboard HID devices. Charlotte IOT meetup group here in Charlotte NC operates AssistIOT where we build out assistive IOT devices for the disabled, and having HID mouse and keyboards is a problem, while possible, it requires much more effort - there is no really good support in Arduino, mostly we’re using ifsexpress’s tool kit which doesn’t have the “bring it to market quick” appeal, that we’ve seen with using particle photons. We also have the Particle to Alexa bridge that I wrote, so we can use alexa home automation with a particle in a few lines of code (https://github.com/JeremyProffitt/EchoPhotonBridge) - it’s that quickness that I desire, and I feel adds a more complete polish to the particle products. If I could log into the particle IDE, and take 20 minutes to roll a assistive device where I can have 3 sensors emulate pressing 3 buttons on a keyboard - GAME CHANGER.
For your customer base, having HID Keyboard/Mouse implementation native to your toolkit, will attract customers because it’s not easy to do other places.
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Got it. We’d like to expand Bluetooth APIs over time after we deliver on Mesh and we’ll keep your use case in mind.