Bluetooth Low Energy on Android Emulator

It seems you can, using Android inside a VirtualBox and using a PC dongle supporting Bluetooth LE (costs about 18$ on Amazon). Here's the tutorial by Chris Larson (copied here to keep it online):

Android emulators are great for developing BluetoothLE applications. The trick is getting the Android emulator to recognize the BluetoothLE adapter.

What you'll need:

  • Androidx86 iso from android-x86.org I used the 4.4 release candidate
  • Virtual Machine software: I used Oracle VirtualBox
  • A BluetoothLE USB adapter: I used the Cirago Bluetooth 4.0 USB Mini Adapter (BTA8000)(affilate link) or Cirago Bluetooth 4.0 USB Mini Adapter (BTA8000) (non-affilate link)
  • Install Android SDK for debugging
  • Install VirtualBox
  • Download Androidx86
  • Open VirtualBox and create a new machine. Set type to linux/other(32bit)
  • Set the virtual machine's memory and harddrive space to whatever you need (but at least the minimum specs for Android).
  • When asked for the OS image, select the Androidx86 image you download from Androidx86.org
  • When the virtual machine boots, choose to install Android.
  • When the installation completes, shutdown the Android virtual machine and unmount the iso image
  • Plug in the Bluetooth USB adapter and add it to the Android Virtual Machine's settings
  • Start the Android Virtual Machine and go through the start-up screens to configure Android for use
  • In the Android VM go to the settings and enable BluetoothLE (if this fails reboot the VM and try to enable again)

Here are a few other links describing more or less the same method, and a few other tools that can be of interest to you:

  • http://technoga.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/debug-a-bluetooth-app-with-android-emulator-on-pc/
  • http://niro-offonatangent.blogspot.fr/2011/06/bluetooth-support-on-android-emulator.html
  • http://referenceforu.blogspot.fr/2013/08/testing-bluetooth-in-android-emulator.html
  • https://stackoverflow.com/a/2614840/1121352
  • https://github.com/cheng81/Android-Bluetooth-Simulator
  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.magicandroidapps.bluetoothterm&hl=fr
  • a set of opensource tools to develop Bluetooth LE apps on Android: https://github.com/grundid/bletools and http://blog.opendatalab.de/hack/2013/11/15/bluetooth-low-energy-tools-library-for-android/

And if you want this issue to be solved by Google, you can star this thread to make it more visible (with enough votes, Google will tackle it in a few years, as they did with audio issues...):

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=56608


Using the Emulator said that

Emulator Limitations

The functional limitations of the emulator include:

No support for placing or receiving actual phone calls. You can simulate phone calls (placed and received) through the emulator console, however.

No support for USB connections

No support for device-attached headphones

No support for determining network connected state

No support for determining battery charge level and AC charging state

No support for determining SD card insert/eject

No support for Bluetooth

Thanks,

Tags:

Android

Emulation

Bluetooth

Android Emulator

Bluetooth Lowenergy

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