Can I use Raspberry Pi 3's built-in bluetooth with Navio 2?

Hi,

I am considering connecting my RPi3+Navio2 via RPi3’s built-in bluetooth. But I cannot find bluetooth device on RPi3+Navio2. For example, I used bluetoothctl console to list available bluetooth controllers and I got nothing:

[bluetooth]# list
[bluetooth]# show
No default controller available

I tried these operations on my other RPi3 with official Raspbian, it works properly:

[bluetooth]# list
Controller B8:27:EB:B2:64:B4 piggy_1 [default]
[bluetooth]# show
Controller B8:27:EB:B2:64:B4
Name: piggy_1
Alias: piggy_1
Class: 0x000000
Powered: yes
Discoverable: no
Pairable: yes
UUID: PnP Information (00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: Generic Access Profile (00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: Generic Attribute Profile (00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: A/V Remote Control (0000110e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: A/V Remote Control Target (0000110c-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
Modalias: usb:v1D6Bp0246d0517
Discovering: no

So my question is, is this a bug which can be fixed or a limitation introduced by the design of Navio2?

It can be used but it is disabled by default because it interferes with ttyAMA0 console.

I suggest reading the description to these overlays.

Now we have overlay=pi3-disable-bt in /boot/config.txt

I think this should get you started!

Thank you for your reply.

Looks like the interference between ttyAMA0 (which I’d like to connect to a 3DR radio telemetry) and built-in bluetooth is a known issue of RPi3. I will turn to BT dongle instead.

1 Like

AFAIK, you can make it work but it’s going to take some time and tinkering on your side. Either way, I’m closing this thread. But I guess, the community would totally benefit from a tutorial how to make it work. If you manage to do that, we would appreciate a post about it :slight_smile:

Hi guys,

I was having the same trouble and run into this post.

Simply removed dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt and rebooted the system. But it still doesn’t work.

Any advice?

Hi @dndbelart,

You may try suggestions on Bluetooth enabling from this Raspberry Pi forum thread. But please keep in mind that Bluetooth is disabled since it interferes with ttyAMA0. Without disabling it, RX and TX wouldn’t be accessible.