I am connecting to a bluetooth enabled camera, and I am able to connect using the methods found in the BluetoothChat example.

I need to send commands to the camera. The issue is that I also need to get a response BACK from the camera after I send the command in the first place. So basically I need to write a command and receive a response. However, the thing is that the commands sometimes don't generate a response. Even the documentation on the camera says that you "have to send the sync command as many as 25 times on power up before you will get a response."

So I cannot just write a command and wait for a response, as the "read" function blocks the thread. If I have the read function in another thread, like the bluetooth chat example, there seems to be sync issues, i.e., if I issue a write command, how can I know that it is reading if that is happening in another thread? I did set a global variable to check for, but this seems "iffy" at best.

So basically I need to write to the bluetooth and then attempt to read from it. However, I need to let that read timeout and if I haven't received a response, I need to write again until I get a response (or until it's tried a set number of times). I don't need the read function to be going all the time in the background.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your time.