Reverse engineering a BLE clock
Perfect Time
© Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash
What do you do when all your Bluetooth clocks show slightly different times? With some reverse engineering, you can write a Python program to synchronize your clocks.
A while ago, I bought a ThermoPro TP358, a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) digital thermometer with a display. The ThermoPro shows the temperature, humidity, and air comfort indicator, as well as the time and day of the week. Its big display is nice for immediate feedback, but the device also lets you read its values and view graphs in the ThermoPro Sensor app, available on Android and iOS (Figure 1). Moreover, every time you connect to the device with the app, it synchronizes the time.
While that is a nice feature, I have a couple of other types of Bluetooth sensors with a clock, and I didn't want to use multiple apps to view the sensor measurements and synchronize the clocks. For the sensor measurements, a solution already exists: Software such as Home Assistant [1] supported my devices out-of-the-box, letting me view their measurements in Home Assistant's dashboard. However, I couldn't find any solution that let me synchronize the time across all of my Bluetooth clocks without using the individual apps.
From past experience reverse engineering other Bluetooth devices, I knew that it should be possible to intercept the synchronization commands between my Android phone and the clock. My plan was to figure out the meaning of the commands and then reimplement the same time synchronization command in a Python script that I could run once a day on a Raspberry Pi. This article describes how I did this for the ThermoPro TP358, but you can use the same procedure with any other BLE device.
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