Bluetooth low energy for IOS

[yosi]

Hi everyone,
Anyone know if bluetooth low energy is available now in IOS?

[ewpatton]

We are in the process of implementing BLE support for iOS. It's not in the App Store companion yet, but you can help us beta test it via Apple's TestFlight program.

MIT App Inventor for iOS Version 2.64.6 in TestFlight

Hello everyone, I've pushed a new version of the companion app to TestFlight. This version is 2.64.6 (8) and adds some preliminary support for Bluetooth low energy and the Micro:bit UART service. These features are very much a work in progress and more functionality remains to be implemented. If you are interested in helping test these features, you will need to load your projects into ai2-test since it will allow projects with these extensions to still load on iOS. Regards, Evan W. Patton, P…

Not all functions of the BLE extension have been implemented yet.

Also, an important difference with iOS versus Android is that iOS identifies BLE devices using a UUID derived from a combination of the iOS device and the BLE device rather than using a MAC address like on Android. Therefore, you cannot expect that any of the blocks that connect via MAC address to work the same across platforms.

[Ghica]

I would like to test BLE with micro:bits using my iPhone. probably I did not look good enough, but I cannot find how to set it up. I have a new companion via TestFlight (v 2.64.6), but what do I connect it to, to be able to find the BLE (component?)
Sorry, I must have been sleeping for too long!

[ewpatton]

Hi Ghica,

For now you just need to use any project with the existing BLE extension. The iOS version will know what to do. I've only implemented a small subset of the functionality so far so if there is a specific app you'd like me to take a look at to improve the coverage please send it to me.

Cheers,
Evan

[Ghica]

OK. Thanks!
Here is a little app, originally taken from the iOT site.
What it does, after connecting you can send a string and then the same string is sent back from the micro:bit. On my Pixel7 that works fine.
On my iPhone, the micro:bit connects fine, but the reading and writing of the strings fails, with messages like this:
-[NSTaggedPointerString count]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0xb0a1aada7bd273aa. Irritants: ()
Note: You will not see another error reported for 5 seconds.

Well, actually, I tried first using the micro:bit extension, but I thought that may be not there yet, so I tried WriteStrings and ReadStrings, but also on Android it does not work. I updated to the latest BLE extension, or so I think.

Here are my .hex and .aia
microbit-UART_RW20241101.hex (1.3 MB)
BTReadWrite4_strings_iOS.aia (300.2 KB)