Ubuntu 16.04 bluetooth not working (Dell XPS13)

Solution 1:

I was troubleshooting this for a while on my Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu 16.04, and will tell you the shortened version of some answers in these steps that worked for me. Bluetooth Broadcom 43142 isn't working

List your usb devices

lsusb 

shows this on my laptop for Bluetooth

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0a5c:216f Broadcom Corp. BCM20702A0 Bluetooth

Go to the following Github page and download the already converted driver that matches your ID: https://github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware/tree/master/brcm (mine was BCM20702A1-0a5c-216f.hcd) Click on the file name, then click the Download button.

Copy your file to /lib/firmware/brcm, for example:

sudo cp BCM20702A1-0a5c-216f.hcd /lib/firmware/brcm

Reboot.

That is the simplest method for what it took to get my bluetooth working correctly on Dell XPS 13, headsets and other devices all were able to connect after that.

Solution 2:

Great advice! Thank you. Let me just provide a detail tweak that others may also find useful. In my case I was having problems (stutter) in playing sound through a bluetooth JBL Go from my XPS 13 9350 on Ubuntu 16.04.

After the operations indicated by phandolin the problem remained. The lsusb command provided this information:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0a5c:6412 Broadcom Corp.

However the command

dmesg | grep Blue

showed an error

[ 2.741102] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: Patch brcm/BCM-0a5c-6412.hcd not found

I noticed that the name of the downloaded file needed to be changed. Therefore (in my case) I just renamed the downloaded file from

BCM4350C5-0a5c-6412.hcd

to

BCM-0a5c-6412.hcd

reboot et voilá! No more error in dmesg. Just to be sure I removed the paired device, paired it again and it's working ever since.