How to install mpow bluetooth dongle driver

1st Official Post

    Hello,

    My daughter is really angry with me because I failed getting her new Bluetooth headphones to work. 🙊

    I bought a new Bluetooth 5.0 usb dongle from mpow (this one) which requires installing drivers for linux. Setup relies on compiling the driver using

    Code
    Make

    Which isn't prepared on libreelec ("make not found") . I tried to install build-essentials with apt-get which obviously also fails as apt-get is not working on libreelec.

    I also tried adding the driver described in the wiki (here) as I am getting the same error, but still the same. Seems like I need to find a way to compile the driver. Any ideas?

    Kind regards

    Keanni

    • Official Post

    You cannot add drviers yourself, they need to be baked into the image. Start with sharing the "dmesg | paste" and "lsusb | paste" output so we can see what the Linux kernel does (or doesn't do) with the device and how the device identifies itself.

    Hi, thanks for the quick reply

    Code
    LibreELEC (official): 9.2.6 (Generic.x86_64)
LibreELEC:~ # dmesg | paste
http://ix.io/2OEa
LibreELEC:~ # lsusb | paste
http://ix.io/2OEe

    Additionally I found this, which indicates issues with the dongle.

    The URL to download the driver doesn't work, you can find it on the download page of mpow, searching for the model.

    Please let me know if I can assist further.

    • Official Post

    ^ looks like rtl8761a_fw.bin exists but rtl8761a_config.bin is missing .. although I don't see it in the upstream linux-firmware repo:

    rtl_bt - kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git - Repository of firmware blobs for use with the Linux kernel

    I'm not sure what the story is .. but should give you something to go looking for. If you can find the firmware file, put it in /storage/.config/firmware/rtl_bt/ and reboot and it will be overlayed onto /usr/lib/firmware/rtl_bt where it needs to be.

    adding the config file like you descriped results in this dmesg:

    (http://ix.io/2OMd)

    I also found, that the chip on the dongle is supposed to be rtl8761b (instead of a), so I downloaded this and saved it as rtl8761a_fw.bin (clever, huh?) but of course it also failes:

    Code
    [  591.711160] usb 2-1.1: new full-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci
[  591.812428] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rtl: examining hci_ver=0a hci_rev=000b lmp_ver=0a lmp_subver=8761
[  591.812428] 
[  591.813418] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rom_version status=0 version=1
[  591.813418] 
[  591.813421] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rtl: loading rtl_bt/rtl8761a_fw.bin
[  591.813421] 
[  591.813494] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rtl: loading rtl_bt/rtl8761a_config.bin
[  591.813494] 
[  591.813526] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: unknown project id 14

    http://ix.io/2OMf

    chewitt : In this gist the guy talks about a bug in the kernel identifiying the chip of the dongle as the wrong version. But I guess I can't do any of it on my openelec setup, can I?

    Thanks for your help. I wont switch to nightly as my kodi instance is important at home ^^

    I will switch to OE 10 once it is stable.

    In the meantime I bought this Bluetooth dongle, which works: LogiLink BT0015 nano USB Bluetooth Adapter Stick