Android IRC Office Hours Question About Android Bluetooth RSSI

Question

I have a question about bluetooth RSSI functionality on the Android (either 2.0 or 2.1):

It's easy enough to get the RSSI value when a bluetooth connection is created, but how can you repeatedly get the RSSI value of a connection that is already active? It's really important to be able to do this, because this lets you determine if bluetooth devices are close to each other or far away, but I can't find any appropriate function calls in the Android API.

Could someone who understands Android RSSI please help me with this problem?

Thanks!

Alex

Solution

At the HCI level, there is a command to read a Bluetooth link RSSI from the Bluetooth chipset (Read_RSSI_Command). However its implementation can vary from Bluetooth chipset to Bluetooth chipset. And the value returned is not always useful, for example if there are no packets transmitted in the last few minutes, the Bluetooth chipset has no way to know the current RSSI.

So we don't expose this in any Android Java API at this time.

Nick Pelly Android Bluetooth Team