No Country (Bluetooth) For Old Men

d3r

@Mykle1 I haven’t tried stretch yet. I don’t have a spare microsd card. Did you check your /boot/config.txt?
Maybe both wifi and bt are disabled in the config.

Mykle1

@d3r

No mention of wifi or BT at all in the /boot/config.txt file

Mykle1

@d3r

Seriously, I followed all the fixes I could find, to no avail. If you’re thinking about testing Stretch, I would advise you NOT to update your firmware until the problem is addressed. You won’t be able to go back as things stand right now.

I’m going to move to PC based MM. Right now my mirror is just that, a mirror

d3r

@Mykle1 Out of curiosity, you start with a fresh Stretch image or upgrade from Jessie?
I’m taking a look at my config. I have my onboard BT disabled.

Mykle1

@d3r

I used a different SD card for each version that I tested. Once I used the Stretch SD card things went south. Going back to earlier cards (ALL OF THEM) was of no use. So, I did not upgrade. Also, all the versions on all the other SD cards worked fine. It was only when prompted to update the firmware for Stretch that this happened.

d3r

@Mykle1 I’ll try to get an sd card and give Stretch a try. The extra sd card I have died.(PS: Don’t buy Lexar. Card only lasted for 6months). I use my PI3 for amazon alexa and MM. Aside from not having a spare card, main reason I haven’t tried stretch yet is because the alexa code on github does not support stretch yet.

These disable bt and wifi:

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi

@Mykle1 said in No Country (Bluetooth) For Old Men:

@d3r

It was only when prompted to update the firmware for Stretch that this happened.

Hang on, so you upgraded the same card from Jessie to Stretch? They recommend not doing that because it can potentially break stuff.
See this:

HOW TO GET RASPBIAN STRETCH

As this is a major version upgrade, we recommend using a clean image; these are available from the Downloads page on our site as usual.

Upgrading an existing Jessie image is possible, but is not guaranteed to work in every circumstance. If you wish to try upgrading a Jessie image to Stretch, we strongly recommend taking a backup first – we can accept no responsibility for loss of data from a failed update.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/

Mykle1

@d3r said in No Country (Bluetooth) For Old Men:

so you upgraded the same card from Jessie to Stretch?

No sir. I never upgraded from Jessie to Stretch. I put a different version on each of several cards. Jessie 4/10/17 on one, Jessie 7/5/2017 on another etc… and lastly Stretch on another. These were fresh installs on clean cards. My thinking was that if I got to a version that didn’t work, I would simply put the last working card back in the Pi, but the firmware prompt for Stretch makes the earlier cards unusable.

d3r

@Mykle1 My bad, I had a long day.
I’ll let you know once I try a Stretch image.

Mykle1

@d3r

Do be careful my friend. Google “Stretch firmware kills wifi and bluetooth”. You’ll see the fixes. I think I tried them all

d3r

@Mykle1
Hey,
I was able to get bluetooth audio to work on Raspbian stretch. I tried it last weekend and ran into some issues but I was able to solve(with some help from the raspberry pi forum) it this morning. I’ve had a stable connection for about 3 hours.

Mykle1

@d3r

With MM? Well done, sir!

I’d be interested in knowing what you did to resolve that although I’ve moved away from the Pi for the most part.

d3r

Yes, my pi runs MM with about 10 modules and the amazon alexa sdk.
I documented the process here.
[link text]https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=198501(link url)

Mykle1

@d3r said in No Country (Bluetooth) For Old Men:

I documented the process here.

Nicely done!

Still, unless there is some advantage to running Stretch for the purposes of MM, I’d be hesitant to recommend it to anyone. Stretch still has issues, and where BT is concerned, the last versions of Jessie work just fine. You had to jump through some hoops to get BT working using Stretch. A new MM user shouldn’t have to do that or may not be able to. The last version of Jessie handles MM perfectly and BT out of the box. Of course, this is just my opinion. :-)

d3r

@Mykle1 I agree with you on that.
There’s no reason to upgrade to stretch unless you really need to. In my case, I had to upgrade to stretch because the latest alexa sdk doesn’t support jessie. When I say upgrade, I moved every thing to a new card.
My pi zero runs pihole + open vpn and is still on jessie. No reason to switch that one unless the foundation stops releasing updates for jessie.