Bluetooth Woes on mid-2007 MacBook

Background

I am working on getting a Desktop setup on a (white unibody) MacBook. I am mostly successful at this point getting FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE installed, I have a full DE - LXQt - which is working well. I have networking (both Ethernet and WiF), keyboard, and even the trackpad going. I’ve skipped over FireWire since I can’t even find a FW drive or peripheral to try out.

I only have a few unchecked items on my list: webcam, bluetooth and waking from sleep. Both the webcam bluetooth on this Mac are USB devices and they are partially discovered by FreeBSD. I can query it and while it responds with a vendor ID of 0x5c (Apple), I found after some reasearch it’s a Cambridge Silicon device, so I am not hopeful a compatible driver will become available anytime soon. The webcam is Micron and that’s another story for another time.

Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse

I am trying to attach a Logitech K380 keyboard and an MX Anywhere 3 mouse to this system. I was able to get the keyboard to work once never to reconnect. I cannot even detect the mouse.

I am using an ASUS BT400 USB adapter since the built in one lacks drivers.

When I run `hccontrol -n ubt0hci inquiry` I detect my Sony TV (in the same room), the K380 keyboard, but never the mouse. While the keyboard is in “paring” mode I can establish a connection successfully, but it never quite completes. I was following the instructions Logitech k810 Bluetooth keyboard (updated 5/11/2014) and somehow got the keyboard working. But when it disconnected, I was never able to reconnect. I cannot seem to replicate my success. I have defined this entry in /etc/bluetooth/hosts and it’s is correctly identified when I inquire it.

One thing that I have questioned is how do I tell FreeBSD to disconnect/reconnect to a device? When I try reconnecting, it seems as if nothing is happening. When shutting down, I do see an error message USB_ERR_TIME_OUT for that particular device. I don’t know if that’s relevant.

Can someone point me in the right direction to get this working?

I’ve created all of the files and started all of the services listed in the Handbook and the link above. Aside from the mouse which never gets identified, the keyboard does and was able to get it to work once. I just don’t know how to make it work again.
 
Back
Top