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[Rupakpoddar]

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[Telemachus1977]

I used your BLE OTA code on an ESP32 embedded in the grill of my Ford Lightning to animate the LED grille letters. The Wible app works great. Thanks!

[Telemachus1977]

Agreed. Wifi was presenting several issues that this solved.

The grille lights will be powered by a relay that connects to the main headlights. Even though there would likely be no problem having BLE on all the time, I have it set that when the lights are turned on and off 5 times, it starts a new cylon/knight rider light pattern that signifies the BLE is turned on.

I haven't found a way to get out of the robot remote control or serial monitor on the App (Android) without exiting the app. The serial monitor over BLE counts, but doesn't show me the same info that I get from Arduino IDE serial monitor.

20250709_214538.mp4

[Rupakpoddar]

The video looks really cool—that's a very nice animation!

Regarding navigating back from Serial Monitor or Steer Freely in the app: this is actually intended behavior and is consistent across both Android and iOS. Currently, there isn’t a fully reliable way to disconnect a BLE device gracefully without restarting the app—especially on Android—so to prevent potential connection issues or crashes, the app is designed to exit instead.

I’m curious—how does the data shown in the app’s Serial Monitor differ from what you see in the Arduino IDE? If you can share more about that, I’d love to see if there’s a way to improve the experience.

[Telemachus1977]

So here is an earlier version of the code that broadcasts BLE after the animation sequence.

ChatGPT helped my integrate your code and mine, and made it pretty ugly, but it you can see on Wowki what the Arduino IDE shows on the serial monitor. When I connect via BLE on the app, it just shows an ascending counter.

https://wokwi.com/projects/435976606565505025

[Rupakpoddar]

Just to clarify — there are two separate channels in the code for communication/output, and they serve different purposes:

1. Serial Monitor Output (via Serial.print()):

• This shows up in the Arduino IDE Serial Monitor when you're connected via USB.
• Used mainly for debugging, progress updates (like "[OTA] Update started"), and the LED sequence logs.
• Examples from the code:

Serial.println("[BLE] Device connected.");
Serial.printf("[OTA] Progress: %d%%\n", progress);

2. BLE Notifications (via pCharacteristic->notify()):

• This is what you see in Wible's Serial Monitor.
• In the sketch you shared, if no OTA update is happening, it sends an incrementing counter once per second:

String msg = "Counter: " + String(millis() / 1000);
pCharacteristic->setValue(msg.c_str());
pCharacteristic->notify();

So when you connect via BLE and just see an ascending counter in the app, that’s expected — it's meant as a heartbeat or simple test message.

If you're looking for richer BLE messages (e.g. debug logs or LED sequence logs), the code would need to be modified to redirect those Serial.print() statements through BLE instead — but that’s not currently implemented.

Hope that clears it up!

[Telemachus1977]

Sure does, thanks!

[fabrizioPucci]

Hello,

I am sorry, I tested the Ino/App for BLE OTA on a custom board with the ESP32-S3 and initially encountered several issues.
However, after some iterations with ChatGPT, everything is now working fine.

If you're interested, I’d be happy to sketch my script with the community.
You could also compare it with yours to evaluate whether it offers any improvements.

[Rupakpoddar]

Hi @fabrizioPucci,

Thank you for sharing your experience! I’m glad to hear that the BLE OTA is working well now after your iterations.

I’d love to get your feedback and learn more about the issues you encountered along the way. It would be really helpful in improving the code template and the documentation. If you could share your script, I’d be happy to compare it and see where we can make any improvements.

[krahmalovvasil9-hue]

Hello,

I am sorry, I tested the Ino/App for BLE OTA on a custom board with the ESP32-S3 and initially encountered several issues.
However, after some iterations with ChatGPT, everything is now working fine.

If you're interested, I’d be happy to sketch my script with the community.
You could also compare it with yours to evaluate whether it offers any improvements.