Bluetooth earphones working on FreeBSD

B

balanga

I'm thinking of buying some bluetooth earphones, but would prefer some which worked on FreeBSD,

Any recommendations?

I would like to use them with a ThinkPad W520 running FreeBSD 15.1.
 
Everything supports A2DP nowadays, so that's not an issue. The bigger question is, does bluetooth itself work on the laptop?
 
SirDice said:
Everything supports A2DP nowadays, so that's not an issue. The bigger question is, does bluetooth itself work on the laptop?
Click to expand...
How do I tell?

I have a Lenovo bluetooth keyboard. How do I figure out if I can use it with my ThinkPad W520?

# hccontrol -n ubt0hci read_local_name

Local name: W520 (ubt0)

Not sure what else I can use too investigate the capabilities.
 
balanga Try this. Run bluetooth-config scan as root. Follow the prompts. This assumes bluetooth, hcsecd and bthidd are enabled in rc.conf (and maybe loader.conf).

Edit: when it prompts for a "pin", try either "0000" or nopin.
 
elephant said:
balanga Try this. Run bluetooth-config scan as root. Follow the prompts. This assumes bluetooth, hcsecd and bthidd are enabled in rc.conf (and maybe loader.conf).

Edit: when it prompts for a "pin", try either "0000" or nopin.
Click to expand...
I don't have anything related to bluetooth in rc.conf
 
I got bluetooth working on my X220 a good few months ago, I was driving a pair of little battery powered bt speakers. I switched over to headphones and dacs and haven't bothered with bt for quite a long time now, but I did have it working.
 
Looks like I made some notes here.
blackbird9

Post in thread '[Bluetooth-audio] How to connect and use Bluetooth headphones on FreeBSD'

I have got this to work with AVSL (https://avsl.com) av:link soundshots mini-speakers and a thinkpad X201 which has an intel centrino 6300-N wifi bluetooth adapter. Sadly these little speakers are no longer made but they can still be found for sale online.

initial setup was:-

pkg install iwmbt-firmware virtual_oss
service devd restart
kldload cuse
sysrc kld_list+="cuse"

and in /etc/bluetooth/hosts make an alias 'soundshots' to the BDADDR for the speakers.

Then I run the following commands in a script.
service hcsecd onestart
service bluetooth start ubt0 # it always fails the...
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And a photo here
blackbird9

Post in thread 'FreeBSD Screen Shots'

This is a slightly different screenshot, being my X201 using mpv to play a youtube Astrum movie fullscreen about the Vera Rubin telescope - this one.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu4cpaDZ68g


x201-with-speakers.jpg


The two round things near the front on the palm-rest are two mini bluetooth speakers, which I got working with freebsd following the bluetooth howto on this forum. These particular speakers are av:link soundshots from avsl,
see: https://www.avsl.com/assets/manuals/1/0/100620UK.pdf

This is a huge upgrade to the X201's built in...
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It was actually september last year. Since then I've been playing a lot more with dacs and headphones and the bt stuff has got left aside. I seem to remember it worked pretty well, I remember those speakers supported true stereo over bluetooth with freebsd on the X220, which was nice. I probably didn't get the whole setup fully completed though.
 
Just a reminder, Bluetooth is actually on the same card as Wi-Fi. Sometimes, it's really a matter of having proper wifi firmware, rather than a kitchen-sink catch-all generic variant of the firmware for the card.
 
My card in the X220 is a Centrino Advanced-N 6205, which is an old one. From the notes I made I installed 'iwmbt-firmware' package to get it to work, but I don't remember the details now, I think I found someone else's howto and started off with that, then wrote up those notes at the end when I got it working. The steps might be a bit different on 15.x. Anyway, it definitely worked, and in full stereo too. The pair of speakers get paired with each other first, and then it looks like a single device to bt on freebsd. I think the part I didn't get fully completed was figuring out what to put in rc.conf so that it got auto-configured at boot time.
 
hi,

in freebsd 15.1 virtual oss became part of the base system, it is necessary to install only virtual_oss_bluetooth.

by default devd will trigger the necessary rc script to create netgraph bluetooth interface and turn on the hcsecd - that means no need in rc.conf to declare bluetooth, hcsecd, sdpd and etc.

first run
bluetooth-config scan
- that is part of pairing procedure, the script will update hcsecd config

when the device is paired then define oss audio character device, $BT_DEVICE - is the name in hcsecd config:
Code: 
virtual_oss_configs="btdsp"
virtual_oss_btdsp="-S -a o,-1 -C 2 -c 2 -r 44100 -b 16 -s 1024 -R /dev/null -P /dev/bluetooth/$BT_DEVICE -d btdsp -t btdsp.ctl"

start/restart virtual oss service and check whether the character device is under /dev/btdsp.

PS: 1. you might need to load in advance the cuse kernel module. 2. When playing audio make sure mixer or audio player is pointed to oss device or outputs to oss device. 3. The microphone that is part of the headset doesnt work - hands free feature is not supported

This is the preliminary work.
 
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