> A very superficial glance a long time ago suggested that it was a > twisty little maze of de-facto and de-vulgus standards. > i.e. the death of a thousand committees.
The core standard (defining the communication layers) is actually not too bad, compared to some I've had to look at. It's huge, but a lot of it is describing low-level radio stuff (below the hci layer) which your bluetooth chip takes care of. All the "profiles" (application layers) have their own separate standards documents, and there indeed is a morass of (non)design by committee. > Then there's the hardware ... Maybe I was lucky, but my random choice of development hardware (a cheap generic usb dongle with a CSR chip) has seemed to behave just as the spec says. Of course there have been surprises, but so far these have been where the spec was ambiguous and my guess didn't match the firmware designer's guess.
