I've recently been doing more work with BLE devices and communicating with them using my Windows PC. I've mainly been using WebBLE - most recently with the Nicla Sense ME.
I've started using MIT App Inventor to create apps for my iOS and Android tablets to interface with my BLE devices. MIT App Inventor appears to be used by quite a few of the E14 community members, so that's a reasonable endorsement. And there is a plethora of tutorials available for it.
While working through a tutorial on setting up an AppInventor Bluetooth Client, I came across a Windows feature (setting) that I had not used before - the Standard Serial over Bluetooth link. The tutorial shows how to set up a BLE client on the tablet to interact with a serial terminal on the PC (server). AppInventor has a nice set of BLE programming blocks and the client construction and deployment was straightforward following the tutorial. Both the tablet and PC were visible to each other and I had no problem pairing them. Connecting a serial terminal on the PC requires a connection to a BLE COM port. The tutorial indicates that you can locate the COM port using the Device Manager once the tablet is paired. However, there was no "Standard Serial over Bluetooth" showing in the COM ports list. I'm not sure if this is because I don't have integrated WiFi or Bluetooth adapters on this desktop PC - I use a USB dongle (Edimax N150) to add that functionality.
I found that I needed to go through additional configuration steps on my Win10 PC to add that COM port.
If you open the "Bluetooth & other devices" panel in Control Panel (search for Bluetooth), there is a "More Bluetooth options" setting on the right side.
That allows you to add the Bluetooth COM port and assigns a port number to it. I've added COM5.
When adding the COM port you need to set it as Incoming (device initiates connection)
Then that port will show up in Device manager as a "Standard Serial over Bluetooth link":
And you can connect your terminal of choice to it. I used the Arduino Serial Monitor as described in the tutorial and everything worked as expected.
Hope that this knowledge might help someone else besides me - seems like I always run into missing configurations.
