Bonding best practices

I needed to initiate a bond with a peripheral using “Just Works” bonding. This means no exchange of a PIN. I got it to work by simply grabbing the underlying BluetoothDevice and calling createBond(), but I wanted to check to see if this is somehow wrong, and I should be doing something else, or in a more idiomatic way.

val device: RxBleDevice = bluetoothService.getBleDevice(selectedDevice.macAddress)

Observable.fromCallable<RxBleDevice> {
	device.bluetoothDevice.createBond()
	device
}
.flatMap {
	it.establishConnection(false)
}
.doOnNext {
	Timber.e("Connection established.")
}
...

[craigzour]

Hello,

Here is a way to implement pairing/bonding with RxAndroidBle. It might be useful for people having to deal with that process.

https://gist.github.com/craigzour/edf7f3bd8bef4b162887b4244e27dc1f

[dglozano]

I came up with a slightly different helper class based on @craigzour solution. The main difference is that in Craig’s solution, the completable completed successfully if the device was already bonded. In my case, that wasn’t useful, because when I try to read or write the first characteristic to be encrypted, the operation failed anyway. To avoid that, I always unbond and bond again before establishing the connection, so I added an unbonding operation before.

https://gist.github.com/dglozano/9b0ce38a558eeca16137909bd368698c