LibreELEC 10.0b1/nightly -- Bluetooth dongle not recognized

1st Official Post

    I've been using a cheap "CSR V4.0" Bluetooth dongle with my Rpi4 to increase the signal range. It worked great with LibreELEC 9.x, but does not with LE10. The LED on the dongle does not light up, so it appears that the driver is not being loaded, or that the device isn't being recognized for some reason.

    Is there something I can do to fix this?

    Or, can the devs re-add the appropriate driver?

    Thanks for any help with this!

    CSR should be "Cambridge silicon radio", I use the same bt dongle at my RockPro64. So it should work, if it doesn't some driver is probably missing.

    The led only lights up when you're looking for devices & if you've enabled Bluetooth in LE settings. You did this?

    Quote from SupervisedThinking

    CSR should be "Cambridge silicon radio", I use the same bt dongle at my RockPro64. So it should work, if it doesn't some driver is probably missing.

    The led only lights up when you're looking for devices & if you've enabled Bluetooth in LE settings. You did this?

    Yes, Bluetooth is enabled. It's working with the Rpi4's built-in Bluetooth adapter, but I want to extend the range with the external dongle (attached to a USB cable). With LE9.x, the LED flashed when Bluetooth was in use.

    Edited once, last by rkershenbaum (March 23, 2021 at 11:39 AM).

    When I run lsusb I get this output:

    Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

    and dmesg | grep CSR states:

    [ 1.463995] usb 7-1: Product: CSR8510 A10

    So does your Pi detect the BT dongle? Please upload the logs as chewitt mentioned

    Quote from SupervisedThinking

    When I run lsusb I get this output:

    Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

    and dmesg | grep CSR states:

    [ 1.463995] usb 7-1: Product: CSR8510 A10

    So does your Pi detect the BT dongle? Please upload the logs as chewitt mentioned

    Apparently it does detect the device, so I'm not sure why it's not working.

    I posted the urls for the logs as chewitt requested. Do I need to upload them also?

    Code
    Bedroom:~ # lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0471:0815 Philips (or NXP) eHome Infrared Receiver
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:c52b Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 045e:007d Microsoft Corp. Notebook Optical Mouse
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2109:3431 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bedroom:~ # dmesg | grep CSR
[   46.875265] usb 1-1.1: Product: CSR8510 A10
    Quote from SupervisedThinking

    So looks like the device was detected - when you enter LE settings & the bt menu the light does not start to steadily flicker/light up? Does some devices show up at all?

    No, the light does not come on at all. I even tried a new identical dongle, with the same results.

    BT devices do show up in the LE settings, but I believe they're being accessed through the Rpi4's built-in Bluetooth adapter, instead of the outboard CSR dongle. I'm getting considerable breaking up of the audio on a BT speaker in a nearby room. That didn't happen when the CSR dongle was working properly (with LE 9.x and earlier).

    Quote from lrusak

    Why don't you try disabling the internal BT with a dtoverlay?

    Thanks for the suggestion!! That seems to have fixed the problem. I added

    Code
    dtoverlay=disable-bt

    ...to config.txt. I had to re-pair my BT speaker, but now the BT audio works properly -- and the light on the BT dongle flickers as it should. So it is definitely using the external dongle.

    However, I never needed to do this with LE 9.x and earlier.

    Ideally LE would give priority to an external usb BT dongle, over the built-in Rpi adapter. If a user has installed an external BT dongle, that's probably the one he or she wants to utilize. But that may not be technically feasible.