I received my MangoPi MQ-Pro a few months ago, and was very eager to test out all the hardware which I use the most on SBC’s. Bluetooth is not one of the features I use a lot on SBC’s. But after having tested out a lot of operating systems and hardware features of the board, I decided to also try and see what the status of Bluetooth on the board was.
Because I use my MangoPi headless almost always, I couldn’t test Bluetooth with an input device. I also don’t use audio on the board. So I decided to try to set up a Bluetooth access point on the board. I already successfully tried this on a Raspberry Pi.
I used the Ubuntu 22.10 RISC-V image for the SiPeed LicheeRV Dock.
This board is very similar to the MangoPi MQ-Pro (same CPU, WiFi+BT radio…).
The first important thing to check is you’re running kernel 5.19.0-1007-allwinner
or higher. If that’s not the case, update the system:
$ sudo apt udpate
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo reboot
After this, when trying to load the kernel module necessary for Bluetooth, a warning in the kernel logs will appear that the firmware and config for the radio are not available.
$ sudo modprobe hci_uart
$ sudo dmesg | grep hci0
...
[ 9197.854777] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_fw.bin
[ 9197.855274] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_fw.bin failed with error -2
[ 9197.855319] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: firmware file rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_fw.bin not found
...
So it seems the firmware package of Ubuntu doesn’t include the necessary firmware. No problem, the Armbian firmware does seem to include these. We can then fetch the firmware files from these repositories:
sudo wget -O /lib/firmware/rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_config.bin https://github.com/armbian/firmware/raw/master/rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_config.bin
sudo wget -O /lib/firmware/rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_fw.bin https://github.com/armbian/firmware/raw/master/rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_fw.bin
If we reload the hci_uart module after this, the firmware files get picked up,
and the radio works:
$ sudo modprobe -r hci_uart
$ sudo modprobe hci_uart
$ sudo dmesg | grep hci0
...
[ 9399.931540] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_fw.bin
[ 9399.932142] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723ds_config.bin
...
$ hciconfig # only works after installing bluez-tools
hci0: Type: Primary Bus: UART
BD Address: 68:B9:D3:7C:AD:57 ACL MTU: 1021:8 SCO MTU: 255:12
UP RUNNING PSCAN
RX bytes:3624 acl:0 sco:0 events:168 errors:0
TX bytes:34947 acl:0 sco:0 commands:167 errors:0
Now that the radio is up and running, we can prepare the userspace for Bluetooth.
First of all we will need to install bluez and bluez-utils, and enable the
Bluetooth service:
sudo apt install bluez bluez-tools
sudo apt install bluez bluez-tools
There you have it, you can start using Bluetooth with bluetoothctl. If you
also want to configure a Bluetooth access point, read on!
A few new config files will need to be created for this to work, so keep your editor of choice by hand.
Create the /etc/systemd/network/pan0.netdev-file with the following content:
[NetDev]
Name=pan0
Kind=bridge
Do the same for the /etc/systemd/network/pan0.network-file with the following
content:
[Match]
Name=pan0
[Network]
Address=172.20.1.1/24
DHCPServer=yes
[DHCPServer]
DNS=<DNS server(s)>
You will need to replace the DNS server(s) with one or more (space separated) DNS servers.
/etc/systemd/system/bt-agent.service needs the following content:
[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth Auth Agent
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/bt-agent -c NoInputNoOutput
Type=simple
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
/etc/systemd/system/bt-network.service needs to look as follows:
[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth NEP PAN
After=pan0.network
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/bt-network -s nap pan0
Type=simple
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Enable ipv4 forwarding by creating a /etc/sysctl.d/bt-pan.conf-file with the
following content:
# Enable IPv4 routing
net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
Enable ip tables rules:
sudo apt install -y netfilter-persistent iptables-persistent
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o <outgoing interface> -j MASQUERADE
sudo netfilter-persistent save
You should replace the outgoing interface with the network interface you are
currently using, for example wlan0 for WiFi, en..... for a USB to LAN adapter.
Then start and enable everything:
sudo systemctl enable --now systemd-networkd
sudo systemctl enable --now bt-agent
sudo systemctl enable --now bt-network
You can then connect new devices by issuing the following command:
sudo bt-adapter --set Discoverable 1
Go into the Bluetooth settings of your phone/tablet/laptop/… to search for a new Bluetooth devices, and it should connect to it and use it as a Bluetooth access point. After this is done, you can turn of the discovery:
sudo bt-adapter --set Discoverable 0
When executing some tests using iperf3, with my Pixel 6 as a client, the resulst seem to be pretty good for what you can expect from a 6 year old Bluetooth 4.2 module, the connection also seems to be very stable:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201 (test #1)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 172.20.1.184, port 57282
[ 5] local 172.20.1.1 port 5201 connected to 172.20.1.184 port 57284
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 65.0 KBytes 533 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 82.0 KBytes 672 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 2.00-3.00 sec 87.7 KBytes 718 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 3.00-4.00 sec 66.5 KBytes 544 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 4.00-5.00 sec 83.4 KBytes 683 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 5.00-6.00 sec 87.7 KBytes 718 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 69.4 KBytes 568 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 90.5 KBytes 741 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 75.7 KBytes 620 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 90.5 KBytes 741 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 10.00-11.00 sec 89.1 KBytes 730 Kbits/sec
[ 5] 11.00-11.21 sec 8.54 KBytes 337 Kbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-11.21 sec 896 KBytes 655 Kbits/sec receiver
-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201 (test #2)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 172.20.1.184, port 57286
[ 5] local 172.20.1.1 port 5201 connected to 172.20.1.184 port 57288
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr Cwnd
[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 239 KBytes 1.96 Mbits/sec 0 35.4 KBytes
[ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 76.4 KBytes 625 Kbits/sec 0 39.6 KBytes
[ 5] 2.00-3.00 sec 102 KBytes 834 Kbits/sec 0 43.8 KBytes
[ 5] 3.00-4.00 sec 102 KBytes 834 Kbits/sec 0 55.1 KBytes
[ 5] 4.00-5.00 sec 127 KBytes 1.04 Mbits/sec 0 65.0 KBytes
[ 5] 5.00-6.00 sec 127 KBytes 1.04 Mbits/sec 0 65.0 KBytes
[ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 0.00 Bytes 0.00 bits/sec 0 65.0 KBytes
[ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 127 KBytes 1.04 Mbits/sec 0 65.0 KBytes
[ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 127 KBytes 1.04 Mbits/sec 0 65.0 KBytes
[ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 0.00 Bytes 0.00 bits/sec 0 65.0 KBytes
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr
[ 5] 0.00-10.05 sec 1.00 MBytes 838 Kbits/sec 0 sender
After this experiment I also tried to enable Bluetooth support in the excellent Arch image for the D1. I didn’t succeed in this yet. I am probably missing some kernel config options.