The DFRobot Bluno Boards (Bluno Nano,
Bluno,
Bluno Mega 1280 and
Bluno Mega 2560)
are the Arduino compatible Bluetooth LE boards made by DFRobot company.
The boards are fully compatible with Arduino Nano, Arduino UNO, Arduino Mega 1280 and Arduino Mega 2560 and with the
TI CC2540 Bluetooth 4.0 LE chip on board.
DFRobot provides mobile SDK for their boards so you can easy use it with Android and iOS devices. But there is no any Windows SDK. Also the boards have some bugs in GATT implementation so by default they can not be used from Windows platforms as common GATT enabled device. Bluetooth Framework solves this problem and allows to communicate with any GATT enabled Bluno board from Windows platform.
GATT implementation
The boards provides characteristic for serial communication so your onboard code can send and receive data over BLE GATT connection. You client application can write to the characteristic and read data from it. Also the characteristic has notification enabled but, however, the characteristic does not have Client Configuration Descriptor. The lack of the Client Configuration Descriptor makes it impossible to receive notifications on Windows 10 and above. However, we found the way how you can enable it.
Connecting to the boards
To connect to the DFRobot Bluno board using wclGattClient and to receive characteristic change notification you should set the ForceNotifications property to True. Also you should handle OnPinRequest event of the wclBluetoothManager class. The board will be paired during connection establishing (the default PIN is "0000").
Once connection established your application can start receiving notifications by simple calling the Subscribe method of the wclGattClient class. Your application should not call the WriteClientConfiguration in this case because the boards do not have the Client Configuration Descriptor configured for the characteristic.