Pi 3 Bluetooth Driver Not Quite Working

[Terry Coles]

Hi,

I posted this query a few days ago on the Raspberry Pi Forums, but apart from one person experiencing exactly the same symptoms, have received no responses.

Here is what I said:

Are there still known issues with the Bluetooth driver on the Raspberry Pi 3? It was mentioned in the Pi 3 edition of MagPi that the driver wasn't yet finished at that time.

We have just spent quite a few hours trying to pair and connect a keyboard and mouse (Tecknet X366 and BC309 respectively) to our RPi 3. These devices work fine on our Chromebook. I was also able to get them working on my desktop PC, which runs Kubuntu, using a Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth dongle which I've had for donkey's years. We cannot maintain a connection on the Pi 3 using the integrated Bluetooth.

We initially tried using Blueman to set things up and this worked OK for the mouse, but wouldn't pair the keyboard. We've read somewhere that there are issues with Blueman, so we weren't too concerned. We then tried with bluetoothctl and were able to pair, trust and connect both devices, but not both at the same time!

What we have found is that we can make it all work extremely reliably if we plug the aforesaid ancient dongle into the RPi 3 and make it the default device, but the system is unusable if we try to use the integrated device. We've installed pi-bluetooth and all the associated packages, (AFAICT), so we can only assume that there is some limitation in the driver.

Any comments on this?

Some additional information that I've figured out since I posted the original query is that I wonder if this particular pair of devices are making full use of the low energy mode of Bluetooth, when connected to the RPi 3 chip, but since the BT dongle doesn't support this (it's Issue 2), they don't. Both devices go into a power saving mode after approx 3 seconds of inactivity.

[Lurchman (k-launchpad-loowis-durge-org)]

Take a look at https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-update-raspbian/ if you haven't already.

[Terry Coles (lp-hadrian-way)]

Hi,

Thanks for pointing that out; I'd already seen this, but not had time to run the upgrade until today.

Unfortunately, the new bluetooth feature is at the UI level, not the driver, so the problem is still apparent. I must say that the new lxpanel plugin is much easier to use than the ones that I tried (Gnome, etc), but does not (and cannot I suspect) fix my problem.

I don't have access to any other modern keyboards or mice (eg those that support Bluetooth V 4.0, including low power mode), so I cannot confirm that this problem isn't just confined to Tecknet devices.

What I do know is that the mouse goes to sleep after a few seconds and even when I click the button to wake it up, it takes several seconds to reconnect. I suspect that the keyboard is behaving in a similar manner, so it is also lost if I don't keep typing. Put the two together and you are probably on a hiding to nothing.

I have also been able to try something else since my last post. I received delivery of a brand-new Dell XPS-13 Developer Edition recently and today I tried to pair these two devices to it. What I found was that the Bluetooth GUI on Ubuntu never asked me to enter a code on the keyboard, so I wasn't able to pair it. The mouse behaved in exactly the same way as it does on the Pi. This reinforces my belief that the problem is much deeper than the Pi and actually is at the bluez / kernel level.

I'll see if I can post this report on the bluez or main Ubuntu pages.