Headless Raspberry Pi BT

General
1

ok-- i’ve spent a lot of hours on this and haven’t found a lot of help elsewhere, but i know there are some smart people on here that likely have this knowledge, so:

running a raspberry pi 3 headless and i’d like to connect to it via bluetooth for ssh. i’m using a macbook, so internet sharing is also easy. i’m trying to simply be able to click the BT dropdown on the mac to connect.

and for a few glorious moments at different times it was working-- i was able to simple ssh pi@raspberrypi.local and all was well. but the connections were getting dropped and pairing is very unreliable. i’ve started from a new image now several times and haven’t been able to replicate a working setup-- in fact, i can’t even say what precisely i did to get to those magic working moments and i’ve now entered a total fog.

this seems like it should be an easy thing with minimal setup-- can someone here help me out? this seems like a valuable general use case, and perhaps it’s dead-simple with a GUI helper, but i’m doing it all on the command line.

pulling from: https://github.com/bablokb/pi-btnap and https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=37655 and https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/29504/how-can-i-set-up-a-bluetooth-pan-connection-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-an-ipod

ps. awesome bonus tip: hold shift+option when you click the macos BT icon and you get extra debug tools!

2

This might not be the issue, but in general I’ve found OSX (atleast Yosemite which I’m still on ) bluetooth to be a bit buggy. Periodically my laptop will stop connecting to a bluetooth device, and I have to remove it from the bluetooth device list before it can be reconnected.

3

I haven’t touched my pi in quite a while, but are you totally sure that it wasn’t also connected to the same wifi when you managed to successfully ssh in?

“ssh over Bluetooth” actually raised a flag for me, since I was always under the impression that BT is basically just a serial pipe (rather than a network stack with ports, etc), but I did find some precendent for it in a search: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=47201

(Obviously Maemo isn’t a pi platform, but it looks like there are some helpful Linux bits in there if you haven’t seen them)

4

i appreciate the second-guessing. indeed, the macos bt implementation feels frail at times. and certainly bluetooth networking is a thing-- bt is just the physical pipes which can have protocols overlaid. once you have IP you can ssh/whatever. i definitely have had it working as desired, just with dropouts.

it seems like a simple setup issue with bluez and basic linux networking, neither of which i’m an expert at.