BluePup bluetooth manager has returned

BluePup is a GUI for the 'bluetoothctl' curses text-mode utility that is in the 'bluez' package. I developed it in 2016, and it did appear in some early releases of EasyOS Pyro-series, and Quirky I think. But then it lapsed and I haven't done anything with it since 2016. Well, not quite, I did fix it a tiny-bit in 2019.

Here is a post from 2016:

https://bkhome.org/news/201604/bluepup-bluetooth-management.html

And when I briefly looked at BluePup in 2019:

https://bkhome.org/news/201911/bluetooth-fixes-for-easy.html

Here we are in October 2020, and the little itch that was always there, to fix BluePup, is now getting scratched.

The main motivation is some frustration with Blueman. Yes, very sophisticated, but it behaves, to me, in indeterminate ways. I would like something simple, that I fully understand, that I can make behave in any way that I want.

BluePup is written in ash/bash shell script, using 'gtkdialog' for the GUI, and requires 'bluetoothctl'. Minimal requirements, that any pup-derivative would have. Except that EasyOS has an enhanced MSCW (Multiple Sound card Wizard) and 'bluealsa', that BluePup will use, that may not be in other pups.

This post is a progress report, BluePup "2020" is not yet complete. Here is the GUI at startup:

Clicking the "SCAN" button...

...those devices "Living room" and "OPPO A9 2020" belong to my neighbour!

What is still being worked on is the important part, connecting a device. The basic idea is, click on a device in "New devices" or "Registered devices", and appropriate status information will appear in the "Status" frame, and appropriate buttons will appear in the "Actions" frame

The "X" icon on the "Registered devices" means that they are currently not connected. Clicking on one of them, it would be appropriate to show a "Connect" button. Ditto, if it was connected, with a "tick" icon, it would be appropriate to show a "Disconnect" button. Probably a "Remove" button would be appropriate in both cases.

It is still in flux, the GUI layout could change. Development is pushing the limit of my knowledge of gtkdialog programming. It would be nice if it gets to the point of being suitable as a replacement for Blueman. Note, there is also a companion 'bluepup_tray'. 

Tags: easy