How do I get bluez 5 to accept a fixed pin?

Question

I can find nothing on how to do this. I am programming an Intel Edison in C and an Android phone in Java. I want to pair the Edison from the Android phone. I would think simple pairing (sspmode 1) would work but I get an error message on the phone about a wrong pin where no pin was requested. With sspmode 0 I get asked for a password but have no idea what it is as it is randomly generated in my NoInputNoOutput Edison. We have everything else working. If we pair from Edison manually, the rest of the code can connect and send bluetooth messages back and forth from the Edison to the phone. But pairing from Edison to any random phone that walks by is not acceptable. I think it is called Bluejacking.

I have seen some posts about using simple-agent but frankly what I understand is that BlueZ security changed so much between 4 and 5 that most all that I see doesn't work. I also see that the switch from 4 to 5 broke a lot of systems so I don't feel alone. I would try it but simple-agent is not on Edison and I have not found a procedure to install it. And as I don't know if the little I can find applies to version 5 as it all references version 4 I am feeling a little lost.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to something that will work on BlueZ 5? I am on 5.18.

Answer 1

The solution presented on the last post of this article does work http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-wireless-networking-41/setting-up-bluez-with-a-passkey-pin-to-be-used-as-headset-for-iphone-816003/

Edit simple-agent, put it somewhere, make it executable, put the missing files in the same directory and run it. It must stay running for it to be active.

In my case, the missing file was bluezutils.py.

Run hciconfig hci0 sspmode 0 first

Answer 2

Pl use Bluz5.30. Initially it was really difficult to bring up bluetooth using Bluez 5. It seems it was okay with Bluez 4.I have tried different versions of Bluez 5 on my LFS build. Even up to Bluez 5.28 it was not satisfactory. Now it is Bluz5.30, with this, LFS doc and lot of trail, I could manage. I feel Bluez is one of the most badly documented user unfriendly software. I also feel it is very buggy. It can hang machines forcing to hard boot the system. I have seen bluetooth forcing the Android phone also to reboot. So it is important to get the latest version of the software. But to make the bluetooth speaker work Pulseaudio was needed. It is better to get the latest version; here also LFS doc was fine. So the process of connecting speaker was using bluetoothctl is as follows;

>> power on
>> scan on
>> pairable on
>> pair <device>

>> agent on
>> default-agent

Now the actual sound. Here pactl and pacmd are useful. paplay -d can test the devices. using pacmd with command 'list-sinks' can show the devices.

pacmd ->list-modules can show the modules loaded.

How to change automatically the audio output to bluetooth speaker when it is connected?

For me in one machine it was working fine, with an identical LFS in another machine it was not working. Finally it was identified as a missing module module-device-manager with arg do_routing=1.

Once it was loaded everything was fine. This particular module was not shown in the pulse configurations. So I have to find that and load, pacmd

load-module module-device-manager do_routing=1 One can add a line in the default configuration file available in /etc/pulse.or one can add it in the user configuration file also.Now to make the new bluetooth speaker being used to play sound. For that issue the command 'move-sink-input ' using pacmd. You can find the sink names my issuing the command 'list-sinks'. If your speaker is not connecting, it may be that it is already connected elsewhere. If it is not so, remove-device; scan on; pair; and connect using bluetoothctl. I was worrying how to make file transfer using bluetooth (Bluez5). Actually very little information is available in LFS documention or in general in the NET. This very true and unfortunate about Bluez in general. They do not provide any real user doc or nothing is available in net. So the steps are as follows: You need to install OBEX library. Then you build Bluez5 (if it not done already). It will install obexd. After installation you can find obexd in $PREFIX/libexec/bluetooth/obexd.This is where you find bluetoothd also. One generally makes a link for bluetoothd in /usr/sbin. A similar link can be made for obexd also. Once you start bluetoothd and obexd you can find object transfer profiles in bluetoothctl->show.If you need a phone to push objects to the computer, you need to run obexd with options '-a' and '-r '. if '-a' is not given phone will fail to send the file. Now how to push a file from Computer to Phone. For this you need obexctl, I do not think it is a finished tool, and it will not be installed while we build Bluez 5. I have seen it in the source tree and copied to /usr/bin/. It should be used to connect the Phone and when the connection is established one can 'send ' and you have to accept the request in the phone.

Starting obexd as a deamon was a problem. When obexd was tried on a text terminal (init 3) it was not possible to start since it needs a dbus session which in turn needs X display. It means one need to login an X seession before you start obexd. If you dissable X while building DBUS (--without-x) then Window Managers will not work. But there is solution with 'dus-run-session < command> [args]'. That means you can start a service obexd (like bluetoothd) in the system start-up. So just by switching on the Computer ( if pairing, trusting etc... was done earlier) one can push files from Phone to computer.

>> connect <device>

Second time onwards just connection is fine. Probably you can trust the device.

>> trust <device>