Rudi Grobler

How do you choose which restaurant do you want to eat at in a mall with 100+ restaurants?

Competition in the food industry is very competitive and these businesses are looking at different methods of getting the edge! Some companies have started using Bluetooth as an advertisement medium. The concept is very simple; you walk past a restaurant and your phones Bluetooth is turned on. The restaurant has a system which can detect Bluetooth devices in close proximity and then transmit an advertisement to this device. Now you can get notified of specials that this restaurant is having for the day!

Using InTheHand, this might not be such a difficult system to implement!

Include the correct namespaces

using InTheHand.Net;
using InTheHand.Net.Bluetooth;
using InTheHand.Windows.Forms;

Detect the primary Bluetooth radio

BluetoothRadio br = BluetoothRadio.PrimaryRadio;
br.Mode = RadioMode.Discoverable;

Find a device close by

SelectBluetoothDeviceDialog sbdd = new SelectBluetoothDeviceDialog();
sbdd.ShowAuthenticated = true;
sbdd.ShowRemembered = true;
sbdd.ShowUnknown = true;
if (sbdd.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
{
   // MORE CODE NEEDED HERE
}

This function creates a dialog box from which you can select the desired Bluetooth device to send the specials too. A fully automated system would need to bypass this step and automatically detect new devices.

Finally we need to send the specials.jpg using OBEX File Push

System.Uri uri = new Uri("obex://" + sbdd.SelectedDevice.DeviceAddress.ToString() + "/" + System.IO.Path.GetFileName(@"C:\specials.jpg"));
ObexWebRequest request = new ObexWebRequest(uri);
request.ReadFile(@"C:\specials.jpg");

ObexWebResponse response = (ObexWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
response.Close();

This code is very basic and still needs some adjustments...

Also have a look at my previous article on using Bluetooth OBEX Listener