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770 points ananddtyagi | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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sardine5 ◴[] No.44486454[source]
A bit different, as it's mainly for voice - but I made an app 'Murmur : Bluetooth Group Calls' - that lets you hold group voice calls and message via a mesh of Bluetooth LE connections. It's available on Android and iOS. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/murmur-bluetooth-group-calls/i...

Doesn't really get any downloads, so not sure there's much demand for this - but I use it with some shokz bone conducting headphones for talking to my wife when we're cycling (also for wrangling our two small girls)

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rjmunro ◴[] No.44508635[source]
This looks really cool. I'd see it being useful as a headset to talk to camera people and others during a live stream. We already have hardware for this, but if we didn't it would be great.

For my use, I'd like to be able to join and monitor multiple groups at once (cameras, presenters, certain others individually), and select which I talk to (including being able to talk to several or all groups at once).

Another feature idea, if you are out of range, it would be good if there was an option to save the message until you come back and replay it.

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1. sardine5 ◴[] No.44522803[source]
Thanks! The protocol it uses does allow broadcasting to a subset of the group - I haven't hooked that up to the UI yet, but it's on the todo list (after CodedPhy and IP fallback).

Re. Messages - if you're not in range, as long as you don't leave the call, it'll send as soon as you reconnect. Messages are not currently persisted to a database though (- unsure if that's a feature or not?). I'd wanted to hold off on that until I was sure I'd covered everything I needed for the schema - they're currently encoded with ITA-2 (which is why some punctuation and emoticons go missing) - but I've made some improvements to the protocol, and intend to move to UTF-8 for broader character/language support.

The current protocol is very much designed to work around all the ways streaming audio really isn't a good fit for Bluetooth LE GATT. It does things which don't really make sense for messages, so I'm intending to separate messages from the live call.

The current focus is trying to make it play a little better with wireless headphones though. I started the app back in the days when phones had 3.5mm headphone jacks. If you've an Android phone and can use LE Audio headphones - they work much better, but wired headphones work best.