Install Bluetooth Dongle on Raspberry Pi

September 3, 2012 by Sanket Sonavane 4 Comments

Using OS : 2012-08-16-wheezy-raspbian

I already had a Bluetooth dongle lying idle at home so just hooked it in and started my RPi

1. On boot i typed the following command to see if my connected dongle was visible.
$lsusb

This returned the following line to make sure that the dongle was detected
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1131:1001 Integrated System Solution Corp. KY-BT100 Bluetooth Adapter

2. Then typed in
$lsmod

This returned
bluetooth 166552 23 btusb,rfcomm,bnep

3. Now to install bluetooth package
$sudo apt-get install bluetooth

Note: Installation takes a while relax and enjoy for the time

4. Now after the installation is completed, run the following to get the status.
$/etc/init.d/bluetooth status

This is returned if all is good
[ ok ] bluetooth is running.

5. Now you can find your blueetooth address using the following command
$hcitool dev

This returns something like this
Devices:
hci0 00:11:67:10:80:F0

6. Now we can scan for nearby devices using the following command
$hcitool scan

This returns
Scanning ...
54:9B:12:99:36:61 YourBluetoothDevice

7. Now we can run a small test to connect to the following device
$sudo l2ping -c 1 54:9B:12:99:36:61

This returns
Ping: 54:9B:12:99:36:61 from 00:11:67:10:80:F0 (data size 44) ...
0 bytes from 54:9B:12:99:36:61 id 0 time 19.28ms
1 sent, 1 received, 0% loss

Success 🙂

References
Brian’s Life: Wii Controller + Raspberry Pi + Python = Awesome!!
Dream Green House • Projects • Raspberry Pi & Bluetooth