gatttool

Gatttool is a NodeJS wrapper for a BlueZ tool gatttool. You can easily connect, read, write and listen to notifiacations from your Bluetooth Low Energy device.

Installation

npm i gatttool

or

yarn add gatttool

Example usage

Below is one example from the ./examples folder .

const gatttool = require("gatttool");
const { Writable } = require("stream");
 
const ble = new Writable({
  objectMode: true,
  write: (data, encoding, done) => {
    console.log(`[stream] ←${data.toString(encoding)}`);
    done();
  }
});
 
const handleData = data => console.log(`[onData] ←${data}`);
 
(async function() {
  gatttool.start({ onData: handleData, stream: ble });
 
  const btAddress = await gatttool.scanFor("FooBar2");
  console.log(`Found a BT device at: ${btAddress}`);
 
  if (btAddress) {
    setTimeout(() => gatttool.write(`connect ${btAddress}`), 500);
    setTimeout(() => gatttool.write("char-desc"), 5000);
    setTimeout(
      () => gatttool.write("char-write-cmd 0x0012 4e4f44454a53"),
      10000
    );
    setTimeout(() => gatttool.write("exit"), 15000);
  }
})();

What makes it different?

This wrapper has no depedencies on the buggy D-Bus or HCI socket implementations. Which leaves you with a pure joy of using Bluetooth Low Energy devices on your Linux-based host machines.

gatttool vs noble

The most popular BLE (central mode) library for NodeJS is noble. It's great but it has its limiations. Below is a table that shows differences between bluezjs and noble.

Feature	noble	gatttool
NodeJS 10 and later	No	Yes
gatttool (more stable)	No	Yes
Central mode	Yes	Yes
Peripheral mode	No	Yes
Raspberry Pi	Yes	Yes
Linux	Yes	Yes
MacOS	Yes	No
Windows	Yes	No