I am trying to communicate thru BLE with a stairway LED controller with a popular BLE module HM-11 (HM-10). Connecting, disconnecting and transmitting works well, the problem is with receiving: instead of receiving bytes/strings sent by the controller, the thunkabe app receives the device ID! I have prepared a sample app as below:
Thank you for your explanation. My controller uses (unfortunately?) this quite popular HM10/11 module. My original app was created in app inventor (with no BLE component problems) and I’ve never imagined, that thunkable, improved app inventor platform, can have such problems.
I’ve searched other topics regarding this issue and I can see, that this problem exists for some years already. Is it so difficult to resolve the issue? Are there any plans to solve this problem? If so, when? If not, I will have to look for another platform.
@infom17z7z We have just implemented some new features for transmitting BLE data–via hexadecimal and base64 values. But as @jared mentioned, we do not currently support receiving data in this way.
@conroy33 Thank you for your answer, but I must admit, that this is a great disapointment. I feel cheated by thunkable, because, knowing that this platform implements BLE communication (I haven’t found any warning, that this implementation is only partial), I have spent 2 months on writing quite big app (over 9k blocks) on thunkable (and was just about to switch to pro or business membership) to finally discover, that your BLE component is only a half-component, as it does not provide 2 out of four standard data transfer methods. The implemented methods (write and read) allow for very limited communication with the server (writing data and polling data). The missing methods (notify and indicate) are nothing strange or exotic, they are widely used in solutions, when both sides send data as needed, without requesting it first by the client. Now I am catched in the trap: I have the almost ready app, but it won’t work without fixing BLE component. Can thunkable tell me, what shall I do now? Can you help me?
@jared unfortunately it’s not a solution - I am writing new app for existing controllers equipped with hm-11 modules. These controllers send data on every ocurrence of an event, so “read” transfer method (polling data every second or so) is not acceptable. And of course the new app must be backward compatible with already existing controllers.
