Bluetooth Keyboard Drivers For Mobile Devices
Customer
This UK based company is the world leader in touch sensitive interactive textiles for electronics interface design. The company’s core technology is a unique electro-conductive fabric touch pad optimized for the creation of flexible, durable and rugged fabric touch screen interfaces.
It is used in applications ranging from wearable electronic controls for consumer electronics and industrial wear to lightweight, low-power touch interfaces for CE accessories, telematics, military, transportation and space suits. It replaces the hard touch pads, flexi-circuits and polymer switches which have limited the growth of the wearable electronics markets.
Business Case
Customer’s product, the fabric keyboard unit, consists of a fabric sensor that allows key press positions to be converted to key codes via an electronics interface. The key codes are transmitted to the target device over the bluetooth link using a serial port profile.
A set of device drivers was required to reside on target devices (phones/PDA’s) that would allow the PDA/Phone to receive input from Bluetooth Keyboard, via the Bluetooth link (using SPP).
Solution
The customer came to SolovatDesign because we have a lot of experience in Symbian Signed Certified device driver development for mobile platforms.
The solution was a set of drivers that supported the following:
- Information transmition from the fabric keyboard via Bluetooth SPP at 9600 baud (battery level, calibration information, typing setting parameters, serial number and version information, and shutdown information.)
- Multiple language version support
- Menu driven structure with embedded help items to guide users through operations such as calibration, pairing and changes of keyboard parameters.
- Compatability with all standard applications (e.g. mail messaging, contacts, calendar, to-do, calculator etc )
Features
Supported Platforms: S60 2nd and 3rd editions, UIQ 2.1 and UIQ3, Palm, Windows Mobile 2005, RIM (Blackberry)
Supported Phone Types: Treo 700p, Palm 680, Nokia S60 2nd and 3rd edition phones
Supported Languages: English, Spanish, Chinese
Benefits
SolovatDesign helped the customer achieve the following:
- Minimum latency of typing and audible feedback of keystrokes
- Simple and reliable pairing between keyboard and target
- User friendly with simple installation and clear user instructions
- Configurable and expandable structure (to increase functionality for future developments i.e. use of special function keys)
- Configurable Branding Options
Tools and Technologies
C++, BLUEmagic 3.0 SDK Bluetooth, BLUEmagic Bluetooth stack
