RPi3 Bluetooth issues?

[TORinTaipei]

Is anyone else having any trouble getting bluetooth going on the Pi 3? Or was anyone having trouble, but then come across some method for using it?
I've been playing with Kali 2.1 for RPi 3. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I just can't seem to get it to recognize the bluetooth hardware that's part of the Pi3. Everything else has been a breeze though.

[vyomkesh]

Even I am facing same issue. `hcitool` is not listing BT device at all. I have osmc installed on my pi3 board.

[dukla2000]

Not sure what Kali includes, but no general/major problems on Raspbian.

My experience says bluetoothctl command line is more usable than blueman gui app - a search on this forum for bluetoothctl should give you all the instructions you need if you can get it in Kali.

[Douglas6]

I don't have any experience with the Pi3 and alternate operating systems. A simple

Code: Select all

hciconfig - a

command will tell you if the Bluetooth adapter is recognized and running. You might try installing bluez-firmware, but I have no idea if that's available or compatible with Kali.

[vyomkesh]

I don't have any experience with the Pi3 and alternate operating systems. A simple

Code: Select all

hciconfig - a

command will tell you if the Bluetooth adapter is recognized and running. You might try installing bluez-firmware, but I have no idea if that's available or compatible with Kali.

I tried that but it' still not listing bluetooth device. Any idea about getting bluetooth device details from lspci/lsusb sort of commands, and pick-up traces of bluetooth device.
As far as Kali OS is concerned, it's a debian+XFCE based distro. In my case, OSMC(earier known as XBMC) is the culprit which is also a debian based distro. I am trying to find out similarity between the systems which could point us to point of failure. However, dukla2000 has reported that it's working on Raspbian, which again is a debian based distro.

[Douglas6]

Sorry, I don't know how the firmware detects an HCI device (via one or another UARTs). It 'just works' in Raspbian, which is all I've ever used.

[dukla2000]

Have a look at your boot messages using dmesg. There should be 5 or 10 lines of Bluetooth initialisation stuff towards the end of the boot process.

[nowave7]

Sorry for resurrecting the old thread, but I've recently tried a PI3 board, and I've tried to enable the bluetooth as well, only to come upon the same problem.
The lsusb and hciconfig -a commands yield no devices concerning bluetooth.
Anyone has any ideas as to why is this?
I'm using Raspbian,
uname -a output:
Linux raspberrypi 4.1.19-v7+ #858 SMP Tue Mar 15 15:56:00 GMT 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux
.

[Douglas6]

You could try (re)installing pi-bluetooth and raspberrypi-sys-mods.

[nowave7]

You could try (re)installing pi-bluetooth and raspberrypi-sys-mods.

Thanks for the suggestion! I actually found the sticky topic immediately after posting here about the bluetooth issues. Eventually that did the trick and now I've got a working bluetooth, even though it still doesn't show up in lsusb output. Oh well, I can live with that!

[Douglas6]

It's not a USB device, so lsusb won't show it. Glad you got it working.

[nowave7]

It's not a USB device, so lsusb won't show it. Glad you got it working.

Ah ok, it makes sense then. I expected it to be, for whatever the reason. Thanks once more!

[HeadGeek]

I have an RPi0W that I had the Bluetooth working with a Mad Catz gamepad. I wanted to make the gamepad auto-connect on boot. I followed a post on here for auto-connecting a keyboard that used crontab. Ever since I tried to use crontab to do the auto-connect my Bluetooth has stopped working. Hcitool says the Bluetooth controller is working, but bluetoothctl tells me that “no default controller available”. I burned a fresh SD card with the latest Stretch-Lite image and bluetoothctl is still broken. I can put the SD card in another RPi0W and it works perfectly. This leads me to believe that somehow using crontab broke the Bluetooth hardware. Any ideas on how to fix this ?
BTW I am not a Linux guru, but I am not totally ignorant either.

After a boot up I get;

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ hcitool dev
Devices:
hci0 B8:27:EB:24:54:8A
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# listt to bluetoothd...
[bluetooth]# list
[bluetooth]# devices
No default controller available
[bluetooth]#

That is it. Bluetoothctl will not do anything because it cannot find the controller. I tried to activate the controller with;
[bluetooth]# select B8:27:EB:24:54:BA
Controller B8:27:EB:24:54:BA not available

No joy. Any ideas on how to bring my bluetooth controller back from the dead ?

Before you tell me to re-install this or that, I can boot the SD card in another RPi0W and it works fine. As the OS is on the SD card, this means that all the right files are in all the right places. Or am I crazy ????