Scanning for discoverable bluetooth devices with Arduino

Question

I'm looking to be able to build a kind of course location based system where a mobile Arduino will scan for a list of currently visible (discoverable) bluetooth points, and then depending on pattern matching will do work accordingly.

Does anybody know of how this might be achieved? The bluetooth shields and bluetooth version of Arduino seem to just be endpoints for attaching to the serial of the Arduino itself. Does anyone have experience with this?

Answer 1

If you can send AT commands to your bluetooth module, you can also discover nearby devices.

See for example this guide. In the example they are sending commands from computer, but you can do exactly the same with your Arduino. Sending command

AT+JDDS=0

should return list of matching devices. Additionally, you can also search for specific services:

AT+JSDS=0026C3AB5A39,1101

Where 0026C3AB5A39 is MAC address of device and 1101 is code for serial port.