Bluetooth LE?

[cavac]

I'm trying to connect to a Bluetooth LE (low energy) device, specifically the MXTP-100 printer (that extremely cheap thermal printer with the cat ears). I tried Net::Bluetooth, but that doesn't seem to support Low Energy devices.

I can connect and print just fine to an old Epson bluetooth printer (not LE), but newer LE devices don't seem to work with Net::Bluetooth.

To be honest, i have absolutely no idea what i'm doing. Does anyone have any suggestions?

EDIT: Ooops, sorry, forgot to include my test code:

use Net::Bluetooth;
use strict;
use warnings;

use Time::HiRes qw(sleep);
use Data::Dumper;

#my $printer_addr='00:01:90:AE:B5:9C'; # Epson
my $printer_addr='68:08:09:14:B7:4F'; # MXTP-100

#### Could retry here instead of exiting.
die "BT GPS not found." unless(defined($printer_addr));

#### Search for the serial service (0x1101) on my printer
my @sdp_array = sdp_search($printer_addr, "1101", "");
die "No service records found" unless(@sdp_array);
                                                                      
+                                         
my $port = 0;
#### Loop through all the service records.
#### foreach service record ....
print Dumper(@sdp_array);
foreach my $rec_ref (@sdp_array) {
    #### Get the RFCOMM port number for the service.
    if(exists($rec_ref->{RFCOMM})) {
        $port = $rec_ref->{RFCOMM}; 
        last;
    }
}

die "No RFCOMM record found." unless($port > 0);

print "BT Serial port found $printer_addr  $port \n";

my $obj = Net::Bluetooth->newsocket("RFCOMM");
die "socket error: $!\n" unless(defined($obj));
die "connect error: $!\n" if($obj->connect($printer_addr, $port) != 0)
+;

#### Create a Perl filehandle for reading and writing.
*SERVER = $obj->perlfh();
SERVER->autoflush(1);

my @lines = <DATA>;
foreach my $line (@lines) {
    #print $line;
    #print SERVER $line;
    SERVER->write($line);
    #sleep(0.1);
}
for(1..8) {
    SERVER->write("\n");
}

__DATA__
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here:
huge success.

It's hard to overstate
My satisfaction.

(I just hacked one of the examples, so code quality is low. Also please ignore the mentioning of GPS, i just didn't bother to update all variable names and comments)

[Corion]

My main realization was that Bluetooth LE is mostly different from "normal" ("basic rate", BR) Bluetooth.

Normal Bluetooth is mostly exposed to the OS as a socket/serial connection, with all the protocol around it, and you can mostly use any of the serial TTY modules like SerialPort.

Bluetooth LE puts a lot more work on the "master", by doing away with the "connection" model and expects the main machine to poll/poke addresses on the BLE device instead to transfer data.

In my investigations, I did not find readymade Perl modules, but in theory using DBus directly to talk to Bluetooth could work (if your OS uses DBus).

BLE terminology, topology

BLE primer