OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: iPhone Bluetooth Tether + WL-500gP v1 = Success!

The content of this topic has been archived on 25 Mar 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

After some time tinkering, I got iPhone 3G bluetooth tethering working with a WL-500gP v1 running kamikaze 8.09.1 (brcm-2.4) and this USB dongle (BCM2046). I wish I had a good reason for doing this other than curiosity. I suppose I could travel with the phone and router and share its connection over wifi, but I'm unlikely to do that. tongue

I'll outline it in rough detail in case anyone's interested. I'm ignoring network configuration and start-up scripts which are likely needed. You could try to start by disabling the wan network, firewall, and other services and running everything like the dhcp client by hand, get it all working, and then try more fancy configuration. Be forewarned, your mileage may vary.

Note this does NOT require jailbreaking and all commands are for your router.

Now let's assume your iPhone's bdaddr is AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA and your dongle/router's bdaddr is 11:11:11:11:11:11.

Start by installing and enabling the prerequisites

$ opkg update
$ opkg install kmod-usb-uhci-iv kmod-usb2 kmod-bluetooth bluez-utils
$ /etc/init.d/dbus enable
$ /etc/init.d/bluez-utils enable
$ reboot

If all goes well, you should see,

$ hciconfig 
hci0:   Type: USB
        BD Address: 11:11:11:11:11:11 ACL MTU: 1021:8 SCO MTU: 64:1
        UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN 
        RX bytes:10615 acl:1 sco:0 events:112 errors:0
        TX bytes:1546 acl:0 sco:0 commands:65 errors:0
$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA       My iPhone

If you don't see something like this, see Problem 1 below. Note, I don't always see my phone when running the scan, but it will usually work anyway.

You'll need to create a pin for your router. This file will get deleted on reboot so recreate it if necessary. Here's how to set it to 1234

$ cd /var/lib/bluetooth/11:11:11:11:11:11
$ echo "AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA 1234" > pincodes

Now, make sure you've enabled tethering on your phone, go to the Bluetooth screen and have it turned on (see Problems 2 and 3 below). To connect to the phone,

$ pand -n --connect AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA --role PANU 
pand[1501]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.36
pand[1501]: Connecting to AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA
pand[1501]: bnep0 connected

Enter the pin and that's it! You now should have an interface called bnep0, run dhcp on it et viola! You'll need to configure your firewall, etc in order to actually share wifi.


Problems I've run in to and some ugly quick fixes:

1. My bt dongle initialises in a bad state and won't work at all, this fixes that,

$ hciconfig hci0 reset
$ hciconfig hci0 up
$ /etc/init.d/bluez-utils restart

2. After starting a new session, it doesn't always work again unless you select "Forget this Device" for the OpenWrt entry on your iPhone's Bluetooth menu
3. I frequently need to reboot the phone due to buggy Bluetooth states
4. My providers DNS servers don't seem to work, so set dnsmasq and/or resolv.conf to use alternate DNS servers (try OpenDNS at 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220)

I hope someone finds this useful.
Dave

Nice smile

Maybe this helps me connecting my Bluetooth speaker to a OpenWrt box

Dogge, I'm not sure the bluez tools are compiled with audio support built-in

That's not a problem. I always build by myself.

Has anyone tried this? I'm curious as to whether this works for others.

even after 5 years, this guide still works smile
-DAP-1350 OpenWrt Barrier Breaker 14.07-rc3
-IOGEAR GBU421 BT micro adapter
-Android 4.0

Thanks~

kmod-usb-uhci-iv (this one doesn't exist, but kmod-usb-uhci does)

(Last edited by vampirexhunter on 9 Sep 2014, 07:12)

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