for my project i got three raspberry pis i had lying around in my dorm, and installed base raspbian on each one of the pis. each raspberry pi is connected to my tailnet. these pis will communicate with my server to send back data to a postgresql database with mac addresses that they have discovered nearby them, but to do that they first needed a way to talk to my server that is behind a restrictive NAT at the moment. that is where tailscale comes in, nat tunneling is great.
i named each pi after a different character in the web series The Day We Met, because i like boys :3. indy is a pi 4 2gb, pen is a pi 4 1gb, and rosa is a pi 3b. the code i am writing is pretty light, so i don't anticipate any problems with running out of ram with any of the pis, i just used what i had lying around in my dorm.
so it took me a while to figure out what library i would use to interface with the bluetooth module on the pi so that i could get a list of nearby mac addresses. i looked at bluez, simpleble, and ipworks ble but eventually settled on loading the entirety of qt 6 for its bluetooth api because i wanted to be cross-platform and hate myself.
i had no clue how qt worked before i decided to use it, but now i most definitely kinda maybe do a little bit. figured out slots and signals in order to make a program that just gets the nearby bluetooth devices and forms a list containing them. i am currently working on getting a database set up that these devices can send relevant information to through websockets (which qt also supports with another module, thank you qt.)
i also am trying to build in the ability for clients to quick grab the TILE_ID_CHAR from the tile, so that i can build a database matching the changing tile id that tile uses for matching a tile in their app, with the unchanging static mac address that the tiles advertise by default. this git repo was a lot of help: https://github.com/lesleyxyz/node-tile. i say my thanks to the author for making this process a lot easier by already haven reversed-engineered the protocol.
sorry for the lack of updates, ive been doing a lot of writing for kwiktrip.fun as part of another project. feel free to check that one out, its a little side thing that me and some friends have been working on for consolidating our different media projects under.