I'm trying to get my Raspberry Pi to talk to my TI Sensortag over Bluetooth LE, using an IOGear Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter. I chose that adapter because it is supported by Linux, and so far it works quite nicely with the Pi.

To start with, I'd like to write something to pull the sensor data - temperature, humidity, pressure, etc - from the SensorTag and publish it over MQTT. However, reading the data seems to be problematic.

Problem #1 is that the most-used bluetooth package for Python, PyBluez had their last release (0.18) in November, 2009, which,