Trust Bluetooth 4.0 Adapter in Linux

January 3, 2017 - 2 mins read

This is a quick writeup of how to get the Trust Bluetooth 4.0 adapter (dongle) working in Linux, Ubuntu 16.04.

The Bluetooth adapter in my ThinkPad X1 Carbon has never worked, it was a heavily used laptop when I purchased it, so it may have been broken for some time. I spent some time early on trying to get it to work, but to no avail unfortunately.

Today I stumbled upon a quite cheap Bluetooth adapter from Trust at Net-on-Net here in Västerås. The adapter use a chipset common to many such small Bluetooth dongles:

$ lsusb
...
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HID mode)
...

The dongle is a bit stubborn since it starts up in HID mode, instead of HCI mode, by default. However, thanks to the power open source there is a way to switch it around without having to resort to using Windows.

Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/97-hid2hci.rules as root and add the following line:

$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/97-hid2hci.rules
ATTR{idVendor}=="0a12", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", RUN+="/lib/udev/hid2hci --mode=hci --method=csr2 --devpath=%p"

Simply unplugging and plugging it back in again didn’t work for me, so reboot your laptop/system/raspberry to get it to work. Having started up you can check the output of lsusb again:

$ lsusb
...
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)
...

Then check hciool to verify Linux has found the Bluetooth dongle:

$ hcitool dev
Devices:
       hci0	00:1A:7D:DA:71:13

Good Luck! :)