This step is the same process as for Step 03 of the original article.

sudo apt-get install -y python-gobject bluez bluez-tools python-bluez python-dev python-pip python-gtk2

sudo pip2 install evdev

This is where things start to diverge. Bluez 5 uses a different mechanism than Bluez 4 to configure plug-ins and SDP profiles. It is no longer possible to disable plug-ins using /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

Instead, I found that the easiest thing to do was to kill the bluetooth daemon and run it in the foreground

• Stop the background process

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop

• Open a dedicated terminal and tun the bluetooth daemon in the foreground

sudo /usr/sbin/bluetoothd --nodetach --debug -p time

Note: This will disable all bluetooth plug-ins except the time plug-in. I found this the easiest way to ensure that plug-ins were not interfering with the keyboard emulator. An improvement would be to identify and disable only the plug-ins that would conflict with the emulator code.

My reworked version of the keyboard emulator sets itself up as a DBUS system bus server. This allows client applications to use DBUS to send keystrokes to the emulator and allows the simple creation of multiple different types of clients.

For this to work, the DBUS system bus needs to be configured to add the btkserver API. This is enabled by copying a configuration file into the /etc/dbus-1/system.d folder

sudo cp dbus/org.yaptb.btkbservice.conf /etc/dbus-1/system.d

sudo apt-get install libbluetooth-dev libdbus-1-dev

sudo apt install dbus-cpp-dev-examples

sudo apt install libglib2.0-dev libudev-dev

hcitool scan  # to get the MAC address of your device
bluetoothctl
agent on
scan on  # wait for your device's address to show up here
scan off
trust MAC_ADDRESS
pair MAC_ADDRRESS
connect MAC_ADDRESS