[bathMarm0t]

Just recalling what I did a couple years ago.

Bluetooth is an absolute nightmare if you don't understand the majority of what's going on (which in and of itself takes... a lot of time). There's a bunch of logic going on and most of it is handled in callbacks that you will never see, except the dreaded timeout/failure to handle print at the end of the main loop. Zephyr will ease a lot of those painpoints, with the understanding that you're ignoring a lot of the machinery humming under your feet.

Things that stood out to me:

0. If this is your first embedded project / you're actually new to all of this, get ready to take a beating. "Abandon all hope, ble who enter here."

1. Do yourself a huge favor and get two* dev kits. Nordic provides walkthroughs on getting setup with two flavors of code (zephyr, or low-level drivers). Each has a tutorial for uart forwarding/handling. Expanding on that tutorial will take a lot of futzing around, or actually learning what the machinery is doing under the hood. Learning the stack did not come naturally / I found it very difficult. Why two? Two lets the bluetooth abstraction handle itself / you don't have to deal with it right away when you're getting started.

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-hardware/nRF...

2. If / when you want to attach your bluetooth device to something more useful (e.g. a computer or mobile device), do yourself a second huge favor and develop using linux + a laptop. I tried to do development on windows + WSL and there were many, many hangups with the hardware handoffs from PyBlues to the local bluetooth drivers. Maybe it's gotten better, but I doubt it. My other alternatives were driving direct from Windows bluetooth libraries (behemoths that would take time to setup / understand), or develop for mobile (which also will take time to setup / understand). Neither was an enjoyable experience.

so in summary:

Is Zephyr overkill? - Absolutely. But the path is well trodden.

[idank]

Thank you!