Bluetooth pairing on Raspberry Pi with smartphone

Follow the steps below to pair your Raspberry Pi with your smartphone:-

1. Load a new wheezy raspbian image on SD card via the MAC, from a terminal window enter:
sudo umount /dev/disk1s1
sudo dd bs=1m if=2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk1
sudo umount /dev/disk1s1
2. Boot Raspbian, perform the initial configuration and increase the size of SD to maximum (4GB), & Reboot.
3. Perform a ssh login to Raspbian from MAC, username pi pw raspberry and enter commands:
(enter root password)
apt-get update
apt-get install -y bluetooth bluez-utils blueman
/etc/init.d/bluetooth status
4. Enable tightvncserver  and remote connect to Raspbian to see its GUI.
5. From Raspbian's GUI select Preferences->Bluetooth Manager, a Bluetooth Devices window will pop up.
Click 'Search' on the Bluetooth Devices, go to the phone, turn on Bluetooth and enable discovery.
6. When Raspberry Pi detects the smartphone, click + on the Bluetooth Devices window. Click Setup, specify password 0000 on the Bluetooth Assistant window.
7. On the smartphone, enter 0000 to pair with Raspberry Pi, the phone should display "raspberry3-14" as a paired device.

setting up Bluetooth with raspberry pi

The Raspberry Pi Bluetooth name can be changed using : Adapter->Preferences and change the Friendly Name.


  1. I am trying to connect my smartphone using these instructions. But it's failing. The raspberry pi can see the phone but when I try to connect it fails. The error message says that it failed to setup stream. I am new to raspberry pi and linux, so looking for some help to debug this.

  2. What helped for me was to run tightvncserver as root. So at step 4 run:

    sudo su -

    And then connect from your desktop to your RPi

  3. Do you have a Bluetooth dongle on your pi?

  4. Thanks! The artikel helped me a lot! :-) But you now where are my pictures I sended to the PI? I can't find them on my PI :-(

  5. You can buy Bluetooth 4.0 related boards here: