Your Bluetooth is Bad, continued

Very silly Bluetooth protocols, continued

Bluetooth devices continue to astound me: there are clearly capable programmers who manage to completely misunderstand what they're doing. In this episode: the Elegoo Mini-Car kit.

The actual kit is pretty decent: it's got a lot of parts and polish for something so inexpensive (I think I paid about $30 for mine). Up on the Elegoo downloads site there's a 400+ megabyte (!) download with a bunch of well-written instructions and even a Windows 7 driver program.

Clearly the Elegoo people are doing well in terms of creating a complete package.

But then there's the Bluetooth. They obviously switched at some point from a purely serial connection to a BLE connection; this always causes weird issues. 

How should you interpret a command description like this: {RGB[R][G][B][N][T][M]} ?

A smart person would start to figure that it's a weird combination of text and hex, and would kind of wonder how the command RGB is separate from the obviously hex parameters. But no, that's not it. You're supposed to literally type in the "{" and the square brackets. The parameters are in text mode, and they really do have all of the [ and ]. A complete command looks like this:

{RGB[255][0][0][2][0][1]}

A smart person will also realize that because of the insane overhead of the command, it no longer fits into a 20-byte send; you have to split it into two sends!

Let's analyze. Each parameter when sent in binary would be one byte; in fact they will be between 3 and 5 bytes. The command code, instead of being a nice simple byte (there are only about 12 commands actually supported) is instead up to 5 bytes (the MOVES command).

Wait, it's worse. What happens with {BEEP[0]}? Answer: the beeper should stop beeping. What about {BEEP[00]} -- a 00 should be parsed as a zero, right? Wrong; zero is a special case. Only a 0 counts as a zero; 00 is not a zero. This is unlike some of the other commands.

The programmer has managed to make a language that's hard to parse, inconsistent, and wildly inefficient.