BlueCtrl

REQUIRES ROOT PERMISSIONS
NOT COMPATIBLE WITH ANDROID 4.2

BlueCtrl is an open source Bluetooth input device emulator that can control remote devices. This means that you can use the touchscreen and keyboard of your Android device to control other devices which support Bluetooth.

Because this app is using the Bluetooth input standard, it supports various operating systems without any special server software. It has been successfully tested with the following systems:

• Android
• iOS
• Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu...)
• Mac OS X
• PlayStation 3
• Windows

Please note that if you want to use this app with Microsoft Windows, you probably need to disable a conflicting Android service. For more information look at:

https://github.com/RonsDev/BlueCtrl/wiki/Bluetooth-input-service-conflict

This app requires root permissions because it needs direct access to the Bluetooth adapter. Another restriction is that it is only compatible with a specific Bluetooth stack that is called BlueZ, which is used on many but not all devices with a Android version smaller 4.2.

Build Requirements

• Android SDK
• Android NDK
• Apache Ant

Build Preparations

The build system must know where it can find the Android SDK and NDK. Therefor copy the local.properties.example file, name it local.properties and adjust the content of the file.

The next step is to add the required BlueZ library file and the associated header files to the Android NDK. This is necessary because the NDK stable API doesn't include BlueZ.

The easiest way to get the library file is to extract it from an existing Android device with the following command:

adb pull /system/lib/libbluetooth.so

After that put the extracted libbluetooth.so file to the following directory inside the Android NDK:

platforms/android-9/arch-arm/usr/lib

Now you must get the header files for the bluetooth and cutils includes. You can download them from the following two repositories from the CyanogenMod project:

https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_external_bluetooth_bluez
https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_system_core

Then copy the directory lib/bluetooth from the Android BlueZ code and the directory include/cutils from the Android System Core code to the following directory inside the Android NDK:

platforms/android-9/arch-arm/usr/include/

Building

Open a command-line and navigate to the root of your project directory. Then execute either ant debug or ant release to create the desired .apk file inside the projects bin/ directory. If you use the release target, you also have to sign the .apk and then align it with zipalign.