blescan

Scan for nearby BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) devices and explore their GATT profiles from the command line.

• Linux with BlueZ 5.x (bluetoothd running)
• A Bluetooth adapter (hciconfig shows it up and running)
• Rust toolchain

make

The first build downloads dependencies and compiles them, which may take several minutes on slower hardware such as a Raspberry Pi 4. Subsequent builds are much faster.

sudo make install

Installs the binary to /usr/local/bin/blescan and the man page to /usr/local/share/man/man1/blescan.1.gz.

To build a .deb package (requires dpkg-deb, standard on Debian/Ubuntu/Raspberry Pi OS):

make deb

This produces blescan_1.0.0_arm64.deb (architecture is detected automatically). Install it with:

sudo dpkg -i blescan_1.0.0_arm64.deb

Scan for nearby BLE devices:

$ blescan

Scanning for BLE devices... (5s)
Found 2 device(s):
  AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF - My Sensor (-72 dBm)
  11:22:33:44:55:66 - Unknown (-85 dBm)

To explore a device's GATT profile:
  blescan <address>

Enumerate a device's GATT profile:

$ blescan AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF

Connecting to AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF...
Waiting for GATT services...

GATT profile for AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF:

Service: 0x1800 - Generic Access
  Characteristic: 0x2A00 - Device Name [read]
    Value: "My Sensor"
  Characteristic: 0x2A01 - Appearance [read]
    Value: 00 00

Service: 0x180A - Device Information
  Characteristic: 0x2A29 - Manufacturer Name String [read]
    Value: "ACME Corp"
  Characteristic: 0x2A26 - Firmware Revision String [read]
    Value: "1.2.3"

Service: 0x180F - Battery Service
  Characteristic: 0x2A19 - Battery Level [read, notify]
    Value: 64

By default blescan needs root to access Bluetooth. To run without sudo, add yourself to the bluetooth group and re-login:

sudo adduser $USER bluetooth

• Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspberry Pi OS, arm64)
• BlueZ 5.82