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I've multiple small projects on Raspberry Pi Zero W in mind. They are all some 3D printed parts that will have some led, sensors.

Usually, they will work independently, and some of them will be moved to some random office.

Some examples would be one clock with 6 7-digit display, that will display an hour or a timer. One would be a counter of how many people have come through a door. They are all funny personal projects.

I would like to program some NodeJS server with a small ionic(angular) app to act as front-end, in order to configure it from my smartphone. The thing is that since I will move those, and at multiple places, there isn't any open Wi-Fi. I would like to know how I can expose a website without having to connect the Raspberry Pi to a network or having to connect to an open Wi-Fi all the time?

Would it be possible to establish a Bluetooth connection with a PIN, and then connect through the angular app? if possible, have the web page opening once connected.

MatsK
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J4N
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  • Have you thought about setting up one Pi as an access point and connecting the others to it? –  Jun 30 '20 at 21:36
  • @Andyroo yes but some not ideal for multiple reason. It Will make one more wifi network that use a frequency but is not used a lot. Also it will make a lot of wifi, some of them in my company, and then you have to find the correct IP. So I was just wondering – J4N Jul 01 '20 at 03:41

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It sounds like this would be a good application for Web Bluetooth.

https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/

There is an overview video: https://youtu.be/X55aFMGIWvw

And an overview video from Google on the topic: https://youtu.be/I3obFcCw8mk

If you have Chrome Browser on your phone you can go to the URL chrome://bluetooth-internals/ and see various Bluetooth details of your phone and the devices around you.

The Bluetooth SIG has a blog about it:

https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/the-web-bluetooth-series/

And there are a collection of examples at:

https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/web-bluetooth/

ukBaz
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  • Hi! Thanks! I'm reading your articles, very interesting. But I feel this is more like a web page accessing some bluetooth, right? In my case, I need some bluetooth to serve some web, not sure this apply, am I correct? – J4N Jul 13 '20 at 05:07
  • Your understanding of what web Bluetooth does is correct. I know you wanted to have the pi zero w serve a web page over bluetooth. However getting HTTP working over Bluetooth is notoriously difficult and web bluetooth seemed to offer better chance of success for your project – ukBaz Jul 13 '20 at 06:45
  • @J4N I ave been doing some work on trying to get network over Bluetooth working over at: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/108120/host-web-server-on-raspberry-pi-via-bluetooth-pan/ . Struggling to get Linux Bridge Interfaces working correctly. Would be great if you have any input that can help. – ukBaz Jul 26 '20 at 11:07