Bluetooth on the Wandboard (bcm4329)

As you might now, I’ve recently bought a Wandboard Quad which is a small RasperryPi-like ARM development board. The difference to my beloved raspberry is, that it has much, much more features and beef (quad core armv7, wifi, sata, bluetooth…).

While another post has already covered getting the Wifi AP mode to run on the wandboard, this post will be around bluetooth (which also involves that particular Broadcom Chip).

The bluetooth-chip on the wandboard (the bcm4329) is connected to the OS via UART and requires the user to load a firmware into the devices ram before it can be used.
On the wandboard, this can be done using the ‘brcm_patchram_plus’-utility included in the firmware package.

After you compiled the utility, you can load the firmware at runtime via

brcm_patchram_plus --scopcm=1,4,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 --patchram /bcm4329.hcd --baudrate 3000000 --use_baudrate_for_download /dev/ttymxc2

I got this particular line from here and talked with Tapani on irc about it, it’s fine.

After you loaded the firmware, you’ll have to attach a hci device to the UART, this can be accomplished via

hciattach -n /dev/ttymxc2 any 3000000

I tried to get PAN to work using the method I just described but was not able to get a working connection. After fooling around with it for days, I figured out that you have to change the MAC address of the device at runtime by adding

--bd_addr $MAC_ADDR

(where $MAC_ADDR is a valid MAC address) to the brcm_patchram_plus line. I use a 00:23:76:XX:XX:XX address and everything seems to work fine.
Also, I used bluez4 instead of the normal version 5. Using version 5 I was not able get a PAN connection working.

As usual, ArchLinux ARM users can instead get a PKGBUILD here. After installing, you should add your desired MAC address in /etc/conf.d/bcm4329 to avoid the behaviour I explained above.
If you enable the bluetooth.service, the bcm4329.service should get started automatically.