// the find
dmtrKovalenko/blendr
The hacker's BLE (bluetooth low energy) browser terminal app
Blendr is a terminal UI for scanning, inspecting and connecting to Bluetooth Low Energy devices, written in Rust. It is aimed at BLE engineers who spend their days reading GATT characteristics and would rather do that from a shell than from a phone app.
- Built-in service names live in ble_default_services.rs, and names_example.ini lets you override or add your own, so vendor UUIDs show up with readable labels instead of raw 128-bit strings.
- Connecting to a characteristic takes one command, and the CLI is documented through both --help and a man page. That suits repeated sessions against the same device better than working through menus.
- The Cargo, release binary and install script paths cover most users. The BLE code in src/bluetooth is kept separate from the rendering in src/tui, which makes the device layer easier to reason about on its own.
- The last push was 1 September 2024, over two years ago. This tool depends on platform Bluetooth stacks that keep changing, and the README says nothing about whether the project is still maintained.
- The UI is built on tui-rs, which was archived upstream after its maintainers moved to ratatui. Keeping up with newer Rust toolchains means porting the rendering layer, not bumping a version number.
- Platform guidance is thin. The only setup note is the macOS Bluetooth permission. Linux (BlueZ) setup gets nothing, and Windows, which the README treats as download-only, gets no setup notes either.
- The Unix installer is fetched with curl and piped to sh from the main branch, so what runs is whatever main contains that day, not a pinned release. For a tool that asks for Bluetooth access, that is worth knowing before you run it.