Question about Bluetooth & BLE debugging and logging in iOS

[patrikdj]

Hi,

We are working on an application for Android and iOS where an accessory device will be a dual mode Bluetooth Classic + BLE device. The main reason for using Bluetooth Classic is that we want to support also older Android devices (i.e. before v4.3). I assume this should be a quite common approach currently since it seems like BLE in Android is not yet as mature as in iOS.

What we have seen is that we may need to work a bit to get the BLE throughput inline with what we expect, currently there seems to be some issues.

Now for Android we are quite familiar with how to debug any BLE and Bluetooth Classic issues coming up by use of air sniffers and the use of btsnoop hci tool for the lower layers. For example Wireshark or Capture File Viewer by Frontline can be used to analyze log files. Also we use some air sniffers (with limited functionality) by the BLE chipset suppliers (e.g. NordicSemi and TI).

However, for iOS we do not know what logging capabilities we could use to capture low level system system events. Do you have any experiences in this?

Thanks in advance.

[micke]

Hi, did a search for accessing the system log on iOS, here are some ideas.

There appears to be C functions available to access the system log (if you write your own app), and also an app on the AppStore that uses this method (wonder if it is possible to access logs while running in the background, e.g. at the same time as the BLE-app is running):

http://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/03/acce ... ystem-log/

If you jailbreak the phone it looks like you can use command line tools to access system logs:

http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/System_Log

Apple has some documentation for how to report Bluetooth bugs, perhaps that can be used to retrieve the logs? You need to login with an Apple Developer account to access the page:

https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporti ... bluetooth/

Best regards, Mikael