Show HN: I reverse engineered the Bose iOS app and rebuilt it for Mac

• based-connect

  2 257 0.0 C

  A reverse-engineered Bose Connect imitation program for Linux.

I really love my Bose headphones and in the past year I've used them almost exclusively on my Mac.

Started running into problems where because I didn't have visibility on the battery level they would die on me during focused work or meetings

I know there's some way to get the voice assistant to tell me the battery level but that's not as useful as being able to glance in the top-right hand corner and having to move from my keyboard to press some buttons I can't see on my head is a bit silly?

So thanks to this repo (https://github.com/Denton-L/based-connect) and the ability to dump Bluetooth logs from Android to Wireshark I was able to figure out how the official Bose app communicates to the headphones not just to get information but also to send commands such as Connecting/Disconnecting paired devices, changing the noise canceling level and media control

It wasn't all easy, there's not great support for Bluetooth in the JS world and I wanted it to be cross-platform one day so Swift was off the table but it turns out to use the SPP protocol on Macos you have to go through the IOBluetooth APIs - Thanks to Pyobjc I was able to call the native Objective-C api's from Python and thanks to Pybluez I was able to use an interface that was a complete replica of Python's built-in sockets

Would to head some feedback

• Bluetility

  2 702 4.7 Swift

  A Bluetooth Low Energy browser, an open-source alternative to LightBlue for OS X

I don't take quite the same bearish view on this app.

I suspect the "reverse engineering" here was just looking at Bluetooth LE GATT attributes and values, which you can just look at using something like Bluetility [1]. There appears to be some exemptions to DMCA for compatibility so long as the author didn't copy Bose' code, but IANAL. [2]

The name I think is the more challenging part because it's very close - probably a C&D if it becomes popular to change the name.

[1] https://github.com/jnross/Bluetility

[2] https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq

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