Bluesmirf under Linux (Ubuntu/BlueZ-gnome)

Wireless & IoT
1

Group,

I have a BlueSmirf and have been successfully using it to talk to my Megasquirt for a number of months. I have recently switched to Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) and have finally gotten Bluetooth working. I struggled a long time with gnome-bluetooth which is broken and will not send a 1234 pairing code. I recently installed bluez-gnome and now I can pair with the BlueSmirf. So, Awesome. Now I need to figure out how to actually talk to it. Can anyone here give us a step by step for setting it up? I have added a section to /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

rfcomm0 {
	# Automatically bind the device at startup
	bind yes;

	# Bluetooth address of the device
	device 00:06:66:02:D3:95;

	# RFCOMM channel for the connection
	channel	1;

	# Description of the connection
	comment "Firefly d395";
}

It seems to work as I get this:

~$ rfcomm connect 0
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 00:06:66:02:D3:95 on channel 1
Press CTRL-C for hangup
Disconnected

I did this blindly as I cannot see anything from the device to be able to know what is going on with it. I have the BlueSmirf set up in master mode and have it mac-married to the dongle I am using. In XP, I get 2 serial ports Com3 (SPP) and Com4. The serial port that I use to talk to my device in Windows is com4. I can ‘guess’ that the line maybe should be “channel 2;” instead of channel 1 and will try that, but would like to know if there is a way to query and find out. When I try to connect using my monitor software and using /dev/rfcomm0, it does not connect. I guess I am on the other channel, but I have not been able to see what thoise channels are.

It seems that in the fury to change ubuntu’s bt ‘features’ they have broken a lot and nobody seems to be maintaining anything with bt. For example, many commands that were previously referenced no longer work. For example hidd which is referenced is no longer part of the package.

Any help appreciated.

Keith