Simple question about usecases

[wishper]

Hi, I am not a bluetooth expert by any means, your project seems to help me with a problem I'm facing, I don't pretend the complete solution, just to know if is this possible or not.

There is an android application (I don't own the code) that connects to a medical instrument via bluetooth BLE.
I need to interact with this application from a windows machine (windows have integrated BT but we can use an USB-bt if simpler, no problem)..

My current setup is: an android physical phone, connected via BT to the instrument, and the screen is mirrored to the windows machine via wifi

I'd like to understand if using Bumble is it possible to use only the windows machine, without the phone:

• windows machine with a virtualized android (like vmware or virtualbox) distribution, for example blissos or android-x86
• the virtualized android is using windows' BT capabilities

As I understood, but not sure, it should be possible to have bumble as client and as server in both win and android OS, so that physical BT messages from the windows dongle are transmitted to an android "virtual bluetooth" in the virtualized phone so that the app can connect to it.

I understood that this could be done using HCI bridge.

I don't know anything about BT, bt am technical and not afraid to learn about, just need to know if it is possible or not with current state of the project (or if could be other problems in general)

[barbibulle]

I think this should be pretty straightforward, if I understand the requirements correctly. On windows, you can run the Android emulator that’s included in Android Studio. You run your Android app in the emulator. You then run the Bumble HCI bridge, bridging the emulator’s virtual Bluetooth interface and a USB dongle.
I haven’t verified the virtual BT interface of the Android Studio emulator on Windows recently, so that specific platform needs to be checked (I do run it regularly on macOS and Linux, and I know that would work fine on those platforms). I’ll try to find a Windows machine to double check my assumptions.

[wishper]

Thank you for your kind response. I will try it myself, no need to double check. I was wondering if possible with a more "industrial" kind of virtual machine: since I am trying to build some kind of "product", I think it can be more "professional" to run in a "regular" virtual machine like virtual box or VMware than using an emulator run from an IDE. If the emulator could be run from a script or from command line it would be more acceptable I think (commercially speaking, I mean).

Would you think I could find more trouble using a distribution like bliss rather than the official emulator, or it could be more or less the same difficulty level?

[zxzxwu]

There is a standalone version offically maintained: https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator-commandline. In fact, the official emulator is provided in Android SDK instead of Android Studio, and AS just provides an integration with itself.

Using other emulator might be possible, but it depends on whether they the Bluetooth simulation same as Android.