I'm running Ubuntu 20.04.1 64bit (headless) on a rpi 4 8gb and I'm having some problems with bluetooth (I think). The rpi seems to affect my apple tv 4k remote, which is connected trough bluetooth. My rpi is located about 30cm from my atv. When my rpi is running, the bluetooth remote doesnt work well. When I shutdown my rpi, the remote works fine. As soon as my rpi is booted up, the remote starts acting up again.

My suspicion is that the bluetooth module in the rpi is interfering with the atv remove. I'm not using any bluetooth features on my rpi, so I want to disable the bluetooth on the rpi completely. I've edited the /boot/firmware/usercf.txt and added:

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

But the interference still occurs. Also, I've uninstalled all bluetooth related software. Is there a command to see if there is any bluetooth module running? Or should I disable bluetooth with another method? Thanks!

2 Answers

Have you tried rfkill ?

You will need to run it as sudo ( sudo rfkill ), and for (soft)blocking Bluetooth, i.e.: sudo rfkill block bluetooth.

sudo rfkill list all should bring up a list of devices that can be soft blocked.

That ought to do it for the soft kill side. You still might need to make it persistent so that it doesn't get reverted on next reboot (see i.e.: )

You can also try disabling the device with iwconfig and ifconfig as described in the thread linked above. Try the rfkill at first though, and see if that solves the problem, then look into the other options to make it permanent.

As an example, you can get a list of available devices by typing ifconfig in terminal. Bluetooth should usually be listed there as bt0 .

sudo iwconfig bt0 txpower off should turn off the transmission (="Tx") power to the selected unit (bt0 in this case.)

After that, try sudo ifconfig bt0 disable - you can then re-list your network/RF devices with sudo rfkill list all to see their status.

In any case, utilizing a combination of rfkill , iwconfig and ifconfig (as sudo) should do the trick in disabling any BT or WLAN devices in your system that you wish to turn off.

4

Are you sure bluetooth is really disabled using the edit to /boot/firmware/usercf.txt you described?

In the official config.txt docs I find dtoverlay=disable-bt which seems to be working on my Rpi4. Look at the model filter section too.

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