Bibhas Debnath

Using a RedBear IoT pHAT for BLE with Raspberry Pi 1 B+

Posted on Jul 13, 2020

This involves 2 pieces of h/w.

  1. A Raspberry Pi 1 B+
  2. A RedBear IoT pHAT. (Kickstarter)

The HAT is primarily for a Pi Zero, but it works with any Raspberry Pi with 40 GPIO pins, hence my Pi 1 B+ qualifies.

I’ve had this Pi for years now and it was gathering dust. So recently decided to pick it up and do something with it. First I set up a Pi-hole instance on it and then a Telegraf+Influxdb+Grafana instance to monitor my home Internet connection. Then found that I also had a BBC Micro:bit lying around and it comes with a bunch of sensors built in. So thought if I could connect the Micro:bit with the RPi, then I could use the sensors to monitor my home temperature real time for example. The other option is to get a temperature sensor for the Pi. But let’s call that plan B.

But the Micro:bit doesn’t come with any GPIO interface. The connectors are weird. I need to buy a separate breakout shield and then get a breadboard to connect to it. I thought why not use the BLE on board of Micro:bit to connect to it. And I happened to have a RedBear IoT pHAT lying around as well which I could connect to the RPi1 and make it Bluetooth enabled.

So, I connected it. Wi-Fi worked fine. But Bluetooth showed no sign of working. RPi couldn’t initialize the Bluetooth controller.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo systemctl status hciuart.service
● hciuart.service - Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/hciuart.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)

Jul 13 11:56:50 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Configure Bluetooth Modems connected by UART.
Jul 13 11:56:50 raspberrypi systemd[1]: hciuart.service: Job hciuart.service/start failed with result 'dependency'.

So this followed hours of digging. From updating the Linux kernel to updating all the Bluetooth related packages. Nothing worked. Because I assumed that the pHAT h/w was fine and it’ll just work. When no software changes worked, I started looking at the h/w. Went through the older issues of the pHAT repo, just to find this 4 year old issue.

Bluetooth not working · Issue #2 · redbear/IoT_pHAT
Sometimes, the Bluetooth fails to load when booting up. The current method to resolve: https://github.com/redbear/IoT_pHAT/tree/master/eeprom/experimental But still need to add init_uart_clock=4800...
redbear GitHub

Apparently I could update the EEPROM firmware of the pHAT. Worth a shot. Instructions are here. Essentially,

git clone https://github.com/redbear/IoT_pHAT.git
cd Iot_pHAT/eeprom/bin
sudo ./eepflash.sh -f=IoT_pHAT-with-dt.eep -t=24c32 -w

After that I reboot the Pi once and viola. The bluetoothctl can now find the controller and I can scan for devices. 😊

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo bluetoothctl
[NEW] Controller B8:27:EB:5C:DA:1D raspberrypi [default]
[bluetooth]# show
Controller XX:27:EB:XX:DA:XX
	Name: raspberrypi
	Alias: raspberrypi
	Class: 0x000000
	Powered: yes
	Discoverable: no
	Pairable: yes
	UUID: Generic Attribute Profile (00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: A/V Remote Control        (0000110e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: PnP Information           (00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Generic Access Profile    (00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: A/V Remote Control Target (0000110c-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	Modalias: usb:v1D6Bp0246d052B
	Discovering: no

I still cannot connect to the Micro:bit to read the sensors though. But that seems like some other issue with the bluezero library. I’ll go figure that out. Putting this post out here because I couldn’t find much help on the Internet regarding this issue. So maybe this will help you.

Have a good day.