Hardware compatibility: Bluetooth

[devyl]

First, how to enable general Bluetooth support with integration in sway:

1. sudo apt install bluetooth rfkill blueman bluez bluez-tools pulseaudio-module-bluetooth to install required packages
2. Add following line to ~/.config/sway/config at the end: exec blueman-applet
3. Reboot or restart pulseaudio and other depending services… reboot is the easy way

Now you can configure your Bluetooth hardware on your waybar on top of the screen.

Not all Bluetooth hardware works out of the box. Some need propiretary drivers, which often are not offered for the arm64 architecture.

So please answer to this thread which Bluetooth hardware you use successfully with your Reform. Mine is the following:

Stick: Asus USB-BT400
lsusb details: ASUSTek Computer, Inc. Broadcom BCM20702A0 Bluetooth
Tested with: Marshall Kilburn (Audio, 1st Gen) and HP Z5000 (Mouse)

[matthias]

Nice, thanks for sharing @devyl

An alternative approach for using Bluetooth audio devices on *nix system that I have I’ve stumbled upon in the OpenBSD community and since adopted—actually even not only when I have to use a bt dongle anyway, (i.e. on my desktop)—is to use the Creative BT-W2. It’s a little plug-and-play USB dongle which presents itself as a standard audio device—also on *nix—and handles all of the Bluetooth pairing and audio communication itself.

To use it on the Reform though, one need to edit the file /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf and replace device-strings = hw:0 with device-strings = hw:%f. After saving and restarting pulseaudio (systemctl --user restart pulseaudio.service) one can select the device via reform-pavucontrol.sh.

I can highly recommend this setup. These days I actually prefer it over using system’s bt stack. Not only for not having to install and configure system bt stack, but actually b/c for me bt then feels sooo much more reliable, and fun (again).

hth