RaspberryPi 4 won't boot with activated bluetooth

General Discussions
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1

Hi everyone,
A quick introduction:
My name is Meik, I’m 28 and a big Linux noob.

Currently, we are using Mender 2.5 on our RaspberryPi4’s (about 100).
Everything works fine as it does.
The Developer who configured and created all Mender stuff left our Company a year ago.
Now I’m helpless…

Now we have some Problems with new Features.

Right now, Bluetooth is disabled on every device of ours.

We are using an as we call it “golden image”. From which we create an image and go through mender-convert to create images for our RaspberryPi4’s.

On my Golden Image, I enabled Bluetooth in the boot/config.txt by commenting in
#dtoverlay=disable-bt
which works fine on the Image and everything is running.

When I now let this image run through mender-convert and flash it to a Pi, the Pi won’t boot up.
If I change it back to:
dtoverlay=disable-bt

The Pi boots up as usual, but Bluetooth is disabled…

Please let my know if you need any further information and how I can get them for you.

Thank you!

2

Hi @mmueller!

I can’t obviously reproduce that easily as I don’t have your image, so just two things, one guess and one hint.
Guess: if you have enabled the serial console then (if I remember correctly!) the ports clash with bluetooth, so you can have only one of those.
Hint: see if you can find any kind of boot log on your sd card to go analyzing where the boot gets stuck. Maybe /var/log/boot* can help you.

Greetz,
Josef

PS: 2.5 is massively outdated. you should definitely upgrade.

3

Hi @TheYoctoJester

Thanks for the fast reply!

Yes, I have the serial console enabled. But I need Bluetooth and serial now… which would be a huge Problem if it’s not possible.

Sadly, I can’t find any Boot logs. In the /var/log/ there is only a bootstrap.log, deamon.log, syslog etc…
Please beware of my Linux skills…

Updating is not a possibility, since I’m very bad on Linux.
We tried updating to 3.0+ but we had to flash our SD Cards from the Pi again, and we can’t reach every Pi that easy. (Some of them are in other countries). The Risk of breaking something is way too high, our production would stop.

4

Hi @mmueller,

well then, I’d say you need to do some thinking, because the UART is shared between bluetooth and the serial console:
Pin 8
Pin 10

So this is not something that you can solve in software.

Greetz,
Josef

5

Thanks for the Help,

but I think I don’t really know what I’m talking about and as I said Linux raspberry is just a Blackbox for me.
We will just quit Mender and change our structures.

Thanks a lot, again!