Bluetooth dongle

[Anuskuss]

I'm currently using a Raspberry Pi 2 with LibreELEC. Everytime I want to play some emulators, I have to plug in my Bluetooth USB dongle, start

Code: Select all

/usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd &

and then connect. When I have finished playing, I unplug it.

My question is whether it is necessary to always replug my dongle when I want bluetooth. There's no particular reasoning behind it, but I don't like the dongle LED and don't want it to draw power. I don't know if this is just a placebo, but it seems like my RPi is performing worse with the dongle plugged in (because it is drawing power the board could use?).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if that is the case, is there a way to disable that specific USB port or even all USB ports (except LAN) which I could reenable via SSH or is this unnecessary?

[PixelTamer]

The LED will draw a very small amount of power (perhaps 5ma or 0.0165 watts) from your system. If power were the problem, you would be seeing system crashes and reboots, not just performance loss.
What will affect your system performance is program overhead that the device uses. Performance will be diminished if the dongle is busy or being accessed more often than necessary. If, when idle, it was being polled once a second, you would see no degradation. However, if it is being polled once every microsecond, system performance loss may be noticeable.
If the drivers for your device are poorly written then you will see problems, and unplugging it will help. Seek out newer or better drivers if possible.
I believe there is a command to enable and disable bluetooth, but I don't remember what it is. It is used for power saving when operating on batteries.
good luck.
Pixel Tamer

[Anuskuss]

If, when idle, it was being polled once a second, you would see no degradation. However, if it is being polled once every microsecond, system performance loss may be noticeable.

Thanks for the answer. Do you happen to know a method for tracking this?