The ability to pair an iPhone with HS4

[ts1234]

Michael recently added the ability to mcsMQTT to trigger locally off Bluetooth devices coming in/out of range directly from the USB interface on a HS4 Windows 10 PC. I was just posting in another section and this crossed my mind...

iPhones can't really be selected and monitored by their hex address because it's my understanding that they randomize it for security. "IF" that could be overcome by actually pairing an iPhone with a plugin, it seems like phones are the one thing that everybody always has with them nowadays and could then become very tightly integrated into HS4. for things like presence and location detection. This may be useless as while the server may have a 100 meter range...iPhones don't. On the other hand, I can steam music to a BT speaker from anywhere in my 3000 sq ft house.

Does anybody have any idea on the feasibility of that? Would this even work?

[Michael McSharry]

My understanding is that pairing is a point to point connection so once paired with HS then the iPhone would not be able to use Bluetooth for anything else such as streaming music.

Since the iPhone cannot be recognized by its MAC it means that HS would need to advertise itself (which should be doable) and the iPhone would need to initiate the pairing.

My experience with iPad, when I use it for pairing with my AV Receiver, is that it will often pair again to the AV Receiver when power it turned on to the AV Receiver, but it is not 100%. The same is true in the other direction when the iPad goes out and back in bluetooth range. Sometimes I need to reconnect manually with the action initiated by the iPad.

Others may know of techniques to always keep a BLE connection paired when moving out and back in range.

I did try to look in the manufacturer data of the BLE advertisements. I can do this on RPi and ESP32, but I did not have any luck with the Windows libraries because they are designed for universal windows (includes Windows for ARM) and not for traditional Windows 10. It just became too involved and broke other things when I tried to change my development environment to handle universal windows and simulate a Windows 10 ARM client.

[ts1234]

Michael...thx. You have to love Microsoft. . While I don't commonly really use connected devices inside (do in the car), I'm guessing others do and this wouldn't have a big user audience. Plus, I may want to do so sometime. While I'm throwing random stuff at the fan, I wonder if an iPhone app could manipulate something in the headers to make it identifiable w/out pairing. I know that's outside of your toolbox. Anyway, thanks for explaining why this wouldn't work....along with everything else you do.