Your Bluetooth is bad, January 2023 edition

 Your Bluetooth protocol is bad, January 2023

I've finally gotten over a big hump in my Bluetooth Device Controller program -- I've been poking around with adding and fiddling with devices, and that means that the code has been getting much more "experimental". That's not a good thing for an app that I ship, and which has over 35 thousand downloads! I've been working hard to convert the experimental code into an app that people can use without too much frustration.

With that, it's on to the next installment of this series on crappy Bluetooth protocols, focused on the Govee line of air sensors. The version 1.10 app supports the Govee 5074; the next version (presumably 1.11) will support the 5075 and 5106. All of them suffer from the same three flaws, and the 5106 has a unique and fun new flaw.

Don't shut off communications too early. All of the Govee devices like to shut down their Bluetooth connections really fast -- after about 4 seconds, they shut down the connection even if you've been talking on it. Other devices will wait until the connection has no traffic before shutting down.

Just transmit your freaking data. If you provide data, just provide it: make a characteristic, and make it readable and notifiable. 

Don't fold multiple values into decimal values. This is harder to explain. The Govee Air Sensor, as an example, sends out temperature, humidity, and air quality data in a single advertisement. But instead of just filling in 3 two-byte integer values, they instead take the temperature and multiple by 1_000_000. Then then take the humidity and multiple by 1_000. Then they add the air quality. This is all written as a single 4-byte integer.

To decode this monstrosity, you have to read in the 4-byte unsigned integer (in big-endian mode, even though Bluetooth is mostly little-endian). Then do a weird combination of MOD and integer divide operations to split out the three numbers.

Use the right Manufacturer code. The Govee devices mostly use a made-up EC88 manufacturer code; this is an unassigned value that nobody should be using. But the 5106 Air Quality monitor, for no apparent reason, uses the Nokia Phone code (they are manufacturer #1).

FYI: Common Timeout connection parameters

Each Bluetooth LE device can provide a set of connection parameters. These are decoded (now) by the Bluetooth Device Controller; they are part of the "Connection Parameters" (2A04) characteristic of the "Common Configuration" service (1800). The timeout is the last two bytes in little-endian format. For example, if the last two bytes are "90 01" in hex, that's 0190(hex) which is 400 (decimal). The value is in 10s of milliseconds, so the 400 (decimal) means 4 seconds for a timeout.

Looking at my device library, common settings here are:

• 100 ms used by the SensorBug
• 175 ms used by the Sphero
• 4 sec used by the microbit, the govee, the kano coding wand, the viatom, the vion, and skoobot, smartibot and espruino
• 5 sec used by the gems activity tracker
• 6 sec used by the Mipow and the sense peanut
• 10 sec used by the inkbird, lionel, the pyle, the powerup, the various sensor tags, and the dotti