Skype Plug-in for Bluetooth Headsets
I recently got a bluetooth headset for use with Skype, since my laptop’s on-board MIC port is basically broken, and USB headsets are actually shittier and more expensive than the bluetooth variety.
Now, I want Skype to support the headset the way a phone does, letting me voice dial, answer and disconnect calls, and redial.
There’s a commercial app, the eponymous SkypeHeadset, but I don’t like it for a few reasons:
- Why reuse when you can re-invent?
- Fascist copy protection; each binary is tied to your Skype username
- Coupled to the Wicomm BT stack
- It’s commercial
I’ve rummaged around the Platform SDK, and found the Bluetooth section in Networking | Network Protocols, which covers the APIs at the high level. Len Holgate posted some sample code that he got working, as a guide. I’ve found surprisingly little coverage of this topic, which kind of surprises me.
Other feature ideas include:
- Using the presence/absence of the headset as a signal to clear/set the away status
- Switching Skype’s audio input and output devices to those bound to the headset when it’s present, and the default audio device when not present.
Perhaps I can use the 32feet.net managed library to implement the comms.
What’s not clear to me is if the Bluetooth API provided by MS will work when the hardware is using the Widcomm stack, as almost all hardware does since the MS stack sucks profoundly (it doesn’t support the Headset Profile; way to go, MS!) My guess is not, which is why everyone licenses the Widcomm SDK, but that’s not free, which sucks.