Raspberry Pi 3 - On Board Bluetooth Not Detected

[tcrory]

I received my first raspberry pi about a week ago and I've been having a lot of fun playing with it, but I've been having problems getting the on-board bluetooth set up. As far as I can tell, the bluetooth service is active, however it can't detect the built in bluetooth chip. If anyone has any experience with fixing this I'd really appreciate the help (spent the last 8 hours trying to find an answer on google with no luck).

I'm really new with rpi and linux so I'm not entirely sure what information would be helpful. I believe I have the latest version of Jessie, and I believe I've properly updated everything and installed all of the necessary bluetooth programs. If it makes a difference, I hooked up a pitft 2.8" capacitive display. When I run hciconfig, nothing pops up, and hcitools dev shows no devices available.

[dukla2000]

OK - if you open a terminal and type dmesg | grep "Bluetooth" you should see something like

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chris@dukla:~ $ dmesg | grep "Bluetooth"
[    6.044142] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.21
[    6.044258] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[    6.044286] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[    6.044307] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[    6.044372] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized

This is from my Pi3 - as per my sig I am not using the onboard BT but that shouldn't make a huge difference. dmesg dumps the system log since the last boot, if you type it with no parameters you will see the whole gory details and can scroll up and down. grep "Bluetooth" searches for all occurances of the string Bluetooth (note it is important to use capital B)

Anyway - if you get nothing back from the above command you have a problem. Probably best to post the entire contents of a dmesg output in that case.

If you get something back then the hardware is probably OK. In which case all you need is a package called bluetooth - you can install it (or check it is already installed) by typing

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sudo apt-get install bluetooth

Once/if that is installed then you are 99% of the way there

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sudo bluetoothctl -a

should start a BT command line utility (you need to type quit to exit it) and show you a default controller. If it doesn't you have a hardware/firmware problem. If it worked then type

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scan

and set your device into pairing mode. You should (after a few seconds) see a screen report that something was found. The thing to note is the reported BT address, of the form abef:gh:ij:kl.
if you now type

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trust ab 
pair ab
connect ab
quit

AFTER each of the "ab" above press your TAB key - it will autocomplete the rest of the ef:gh:ij:kl .

And you should be done.

[Douglas6]

If you're running one of the latest Raspbian distros, you don't need to install anything to have hciconfig detect the onboard Bluetooth. That's assuming you HAVE onboard Bluetooth, that is, you have a Pi 3B. I would start with a fresh install of Raspbian, before installing anything.

[tcrory]

Anyway - if you get nothing back from the above command you have a problem. Probably best to post the entire contents of a dmesg output in that case.

Ran the command, didn't get any output. I guessing that's bad?

[tcrory]

If you're running one of the latest Raspbian distros, you don't need to install anything to have hciconfig detect the onboard Bluetooth. That's assuming you HAVE onboard Bluetooth, that is, you have a Pi 3B. I would start with a fresh install of Raspbian, before installing anything.

It was a fresh Raspbian install as of last week, the only thing I've added to it is the package needed to run the adafruit pitft display. If there is a potential fix that you know of other then starting over, I'd love to start there (that screen took forever to figure out, mostly because I'm so new at it.)

[Douglas6]

Can't imagine any problem, unless the Pi TFT required an older distro, or possibly the touchscreen messes with the UART ports. You could try with a fresh Raspbian install, possibly on a new SD card.

[tcrory]

Can't imagine any problem, unless the Pi TFT required an older distro, or possibly the touchscreen messes with the UART ports. You could try with a fresh Raspbian install, possibly on a new SD card.

I've got a new SD card showing up tomorrow so that I can try again from scratch, I'll let you know if it works. Thanks for your help so far!

[tcrory]

If you're running one of the latest Raspbian distros, you don't need to install anything to have hciconfig detect the onboard Bluetooth. That's assuming you HAVE onboard Bluetooth, that is, you have a Pi 3B. I would start with a fresh install of Raspbian, before installing anything.

Started with a fresh install of Rasbian Jessie and added the bluetooth keyboard without any problems at all, so I know the hardware works. The problem seems to be a part of the 2.8" PiTFT Capacitive Touch Display's easy install. Once I installed the screen on the fresh Rasbian, the bluetooth chip was no longer detected. I think something that the pitft install overwrites destroys the files necessary for running the bluetooth chip and I'm not sure how I would go about getting both on one Raspberry Pi.

[Douglas6]

My first thought is that the screen's touch capability interferes with the Pi's UARTs, needed for the onboard Bluetooth. Can't help more as I'm not familiar with that PiTFT. I'd look for support on Adafruit's support forum.