Microsoft has added support for the bluetooth low energy stack to Windows 8, and they have provided a bunch of API's which seem to enable applications to access bluetooth low energy devices. In particular, they have add the BluetoothGATT API's. These include BluetoothGATTGetCharacteristics() and BluetoothGATTGetCharacteristicValue() for example. So in principle, I can write a Windows 8 application to access data from my BLE peripheral device.
Apparently, Microsoft has not ported the BluetoothGATT API's to Windows 7, and there is no clear indication that they intend to do so. So how do I write a Windows 7 application that accesses data from my BLE peripheral device?
TI has application code that runs on Windows 7 and which talks to BLE devices. Is TI willing to make this available to developers? Can we redistribute the Windows 7 drivers that come with the USB BLE radio dongles that come with the CC2540 Mini Development Kit?
When we release our custom BLE peripheral device, it is critical that we provide end users with a way to communicate with the device from a Windows 7 computer.