I’ve been following various online tutorials in order to pair my Linux laptop (running Mint) with my Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian, using BlueTooth. I wanted to add a couple of extra instructions to the Internet’s wealth of knowledge, as I’ve had some hurdles that I’ve not spotted mentioned elsewhere.

My first problem was that the command bluez-simple-agent has been renamed, to simple-agent (more info here). As indicated on the link, one also needs to install these scripts as well:

sudo apt-get install bluez-test-scripts

Strangely, I found these scripts languishing in /usr/share/doc/bluez-test-scripts/examples, which seemed an odd place to put them. No matter, I found simple-agent in there, but it’s GZ compressed. So, to use it, I did this:

cd /usr/share/doc/bluez-test-scripts/examples
sudo gunzip simple-agent.gz
sudo u+x simple-agent
./simple-agent

The script needs to be in-situ so it can find the bluezutils.py module, also in that folder.

Once I ran this, it waited for me to start the pairing process on my Linux machine. That gave me a code, and by the time I switched back to the Pi console, it was presenting a PIN prompt.