Playing around with bccmd and your CSR based Bluetooth Dongle you might end up with your dongle being a tiny little brick. At least that’s what happened to me three times. Having these little bricks laying around I wondered if it’s possible to repair them.
First: void your warranty and open the case of your dongle. On the circuit board of your Bluetooth dongle you might find some connectors labeled with SPI.
Using the SPI connector and CSR’s Windows Tools you might be able to recover the dongle. Via SPI you can upload a new firmware and modify the PSKEYs. Unfortunately SPI is not standardized and there is no Open Source tool available, therefore you have to use CSR’s Development Software which comes with their Casira Development Kit. If you are a proud owner of the Casira Development Kit, you can download the needed software at CSR’s support page.
You can use your PC’s parallel port to connect to the SPI connector but you need a level shifter because SPI operates at 3.3V but your parallel port is operating at 5V. Actually I used Casira’s integrated level shifter and connected the Bluetooth dongle directly to Casira’s RF module connector (thats the big blue thingie in the middle of the Casira board). When you are registered at CSR you can download a paper which contains the pin configuration of the connector.
When you use the SPI interface, be sure that the dongle is not connected to USB!
I usually play with CSR based bluetooth dongle
with dfutool and bccmd.No problem! 🙂
The real problem is.. how to enter sniffer mode and enable sync on csr modified dongle?
There is a little trace on bluez-hcidump utility (csrsniff). Am i doing something special?
You might get into trouble when you accidentally change your interface from usb to uart, or do other nasty things. That’s what happened to me.
The bluez tool csrsniff is not functional. To use a RAW sniffer with Linux you might need a kernel driver.
There is a module for BPA-105 which is located in /usr/src/linux/drivers/bluetooth/bpa10x.c
Unfortunately, there is no module for the firmware used with FTS4BT public available.
Ok man! So we are unable to create a free linux based low cost bluetooth sniffer! 🙁 damn…
you need to reverse engineer the windows driver and find out which hci-commands are used.
Brr… 🙂
I’ll organize something for this !
why not – would be great 🙂
The better way to decode the protocol seems to
use an usb sniffer for windows and wireshark hci support for linux!
Maybe i’m not too far from….
i checked out snoopy. but it wasn’t working out very well. maybe my hardware is too slow.
there are also some hardware usb-sniffers available.
http://www.fileflash.com/program/13429/
Try this… with the firmware updated dongle…
🙂
Great!!
I’m a really newbie to this hardware world.
I’ve been looking for a device to connect an accelerometer sensor kit, which supply SPI or I2C data stream, to a SPI/I2C – (USB) – bluetooth device for my PC data acqusition.
I found several SPI/I2C -USB interface boards with rather bulky.
Since my final object is to send the data stream via bluetooth, your solution seems to me really perfect, meaning I don’t have to get the bulky and heavy SPI/I2C. I can settle for SPI only.
I really appreciate your wonderful suggestions.
Jong
What the fuck are you all talking about??? 🙁
If I turn the uart on (and use it), do I supply 3.3V to the pin on the side or do I supply 5V to the usb connector to power the dongle?
Thanks
TDM
TDM, this might depend on the hardware design, but i guess it could be enough to supply just the 3.3V. But this is just a guess. Try it out – if it does not work with 3.3V try it with only the 5V of USB.
Is the CSR’s SPI protocol available ?
I need to implementy the firmware upgrate of the CSR module via SPI from my micro.
(DFU via UART/USB is not a choice because of other reasons)
As far as i know it is not available.
Any idea how to hook up the csr SPI pins onto the parallel port? I have access in some bluelab software and a 5->3.3v ‘adaptor’ but I got no clue which pin goes where.
hi is all this talk your all talking about for free connection to network providers through usb wireless networks i just starting to try it now could do with some real help if that is possible
I just broke Bluecore 04 external in Toshiba laptop. Bluetooth is integrated inside laptop, so i gues there is no way to repair it? Or is?