Das Werkstatt

This thread will contain several 'funny' things we've encountered playing around with Bluetooth devices.
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Here's my first one for today:

[PROBLEM]
Bluetooth support on an IBM Thinkpad R51:
With WinXP SP1 things don't even seem to work at all with the driver that windows "thinks" is best - There is an unsigned driver from IBM which works perfectly (driver's date is January 2004).

BUT:
This notebook had to be reinstalled - this time it was SP2. I knew that the driver mentioned above worked properly and it also installed the "my bluetooth places" and everything, so I wanted to uninstall the 'new' SP2-driver (Date: March 2004) and use the older one (Jan04).

Well... not with windows...
Although I was able to uninstall the new, signed driver I ended up with a mixture of old and new stuff hopelessly colliding with each other. When trying to enable bluetooth it even told me that I wasn't allowed to install an older BT-software version if a newer one was already installed. GREAT!


[SOLUTION]
Although I haven't figured out how to get the "my bluetooth places" without installing the vendor's (IBM) software, but in my case things only work when using the SP2 (Mar04) driver.

[PROBLEM]
GPRS over Bluetooth-cellphone was once installed on this notebook, but the phone got lost and the DialUp didn't work with the replacement phone.

[SOLUTION]
The new phone had to be re-installed as modem (on the Laptop-side) with a different COM-Port assigned to it.
(see "Remap COM ports" for how to re-assign COM ports in Win2k)

ok, ok... I admit. It took "Das Werkstatt" quite long to get its hands on BT-equipment running under linux, but finally I think I've made it.

Here's my first problem I encountered:

[PROBLEM]
"Protocol not supported" - this message might appear when running l2cap, rfcomm, etc...


[SOLUTION]
I forgot to enable all the bluetooth protocols when compiling the kernel modules (btw: Running 2.6.12) - Check if things like "L2CAP protocol" (basically everything under Bluetooth, named "protocol" is checked)

Several reasons why trying to connect with "rfcomm" end up with:

"Can't connect RFCOMM socket: Connection refused"

1) Try a different value for channel in your "/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf".


2) Make sure that "bluepin" is properly executable.

There are 2 main reasons why it may fail:
- You don't have Python
Solution: Install it.

- The default bluepin program wants to prompt for a PIN using X.
Solution:
if you (like me) insist on shell-only, replace "bluepin".
Check the following thread for an example:

The application "bluepin" is there to prompt for a PIN, but unfortunately it wants to do this graphically.

If you want to do bluetooth stuff from within the shell only, here's my suggestion for replacing "bluepin":
NOTE:
I didn't manage to get the interactive prompt for the PIN running (works when running it directly, but you never see it when running rfcomm), so this piece of code currently assumes a hardcoded PIN.

I've tried accessing SMS and phonebook of 2 different phones. One was Siemens S55 and the other one a Nokia 6822.

The apps coming with gsmlib worked perfectly with the S55, but throw a nasty error when trying to access the Nokia:

ME/TA error '<unspecified>' (code not known)

As far as I've
found out, Nokia's not "cooperating" too well with gsmlib, so I will try using "gammu" instead.

I will update this post with things I find out...

Now here's a good one:

[PROBLEM]
when trying to connect rfcomm and you encounter the errormessage:

"Can't connect to RFCOMM socket: Resource temporarily unavailable"

[SOLUTION]
Verify that the "hcid" is running.