Bluetooth keyboard not connecting on Raspberry Pi

1

I am trying to connect the Plugable bluetooth keyboard on a Raspberry Pi with the debian jessie linux OS, using the Plugable bluetooth USB adapter USB-BT4LE. I get the keyboard paired and mark it as trusted using the ‘blueman’ utility. It will not complete the very last step- connecting. Each time I try it fails. Then using bluetoothctl and the connect command, the error reported is :

org.bluez.Error.Failed

Past posts seem to be for wheezy, so I’d like help with what to try.

2

Hi Libby,

Thank your for contacting us about this. I’ll check this on my Pi with Jessie, and see what I can find out about it. Each time the Pi updates, something changes.

Thank you,

David
Plugable Support

3

Hi Libby,

I’ve spent some time working on this, and haven’t found an answer yet. I’m seeing exactly the same issue you are, and I suspect it is a problem with the Blueman implementation in Raspian Jessie. The pincode function seems broken. I’ll keep working on it to see if I can find a work-around.

David

4

Hi Libby,

I apologize for the delay on this. The holidays have been busy here at Plugable, and I’ve only now had a chance to do some work on this.

I’ve had some success using the bluetoothctl command from the command line after installing bluez. This has also worked with some keyboards that required a pincode:

  1. Plug in the bluetooth adapter and start the pi with it plugged in.
  2. Open a command prompt and issue these commands:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# scan off
Discovery stopped
[bluetooth]# pair XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Pairing successful
[bluetooth]# trust XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
[CHG] Device XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Trusted: yes
[bluetooth]# connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Attempting to connect to XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
[CHG] Device XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Connected: yes Preferences > Bluetooth Manager), but it doesn’t always connect keyboards.

I hope this helps.

David
Plugable Support