Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

Posted on
Wed Aug 23, 2017 6:25 am
forestfield offline
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Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

There's an update to the jessie distribution (sometime in the last week) that changes the bluetooth mac address on pi3's / pi zero w's to 43:43:A1:12:1F:AC.
This upsets piBeacon no end if it's applied to > 1 pi, since they know have the same bluetooth mac address.

See https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/860.

I've just fixed on of my pi zero w's by reverting to a disk image I (luckily) made a week ago.
Looking at how to fix by deinstalling/installing an older set of packages, but haven't cracked it yet.

Posted on
Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:39 am
kw123 offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

You can set the BLE MAC address via software.


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Posted on
Wed Aug 23, 2017 10:52 am
forestfield offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

I don't suppose you have a working example?

I found and built a bdaddr at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/286 ... n-raspbian But, as comment implies it doesn't work - change does't stick

Code: Select all
$ hcitool dev
Devices:
   hci0   43:43:A1:12:1F:AC

$ sudo ./bdaddr -r -i hci0 B8:27:EB:16:18:2B
Manufacturer:   Broadcom Corporation (15)
Device address: 43:43:A1:12:1F:AC
New BD address: B8:27:EB:16:18:2B

Address changed - Device reset successully

$ hcitool dev
Devices:
   hci0   43:43:A1:12:1F:AC

I got the old mac address from a Time Machine backup of ~/Documents/piBeacon/RPIconf

Posted on
Wed Aug 23, 2017 1:54 pm
kw123 offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

I am out of town. Will check next week.


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Posted on
Thu Aug 24, 2017 1:59 am
kw123 offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

... these are typical issues with a new opsys.. may I suggest to stay away from stretch for some time.




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Posted on
Thu Aug 24, 2017 4:19 am
kw123 offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

looking through the discussion on raspberry stretch .. it still has a lot of bugs..

- VNC, SSH have a conflict ..
- the sudo password change will need some work
- the audio part is new, this will change the NEOpixel devices and may be any PWM output
- the plan and ethernet names might have changed. (the piBEacon looks only for wlan0 and eth0 )
- ....

So please do not use STRECH with pibeacon yet . this will take more than a month to get usable

so do NOT do :
sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

the latest SD image for piBEACON (jessie) should work just fine

Karl

Posted on
Thu Aug 24, 2017 5:11 am
forestfield offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

Just to clarify - this was *not* an upgrade to stretch, just an update in jessie that pulled down new bluetooth firmware. This update caused 2 pi's to get the same bluetooth mac address - at which point pibeacon then fails to recognise one.

Posted on
Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:08 am
kw123 offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

I see. Sorry my misunderstanding.

Then use the posted sd and do not upgrade


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Posted on
Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:30 am
forestfield offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

Understood. The 2 pi's affected were one's I already had that are used for other purposes - I just wanted to play with pibeacon before I committed to buying more pi's and some tags.

In this case I'd just had some new tags arrive, and they couldn't see seen, so installed blupy/blescan to see what was going on. It wa this that (I think) triggered the firmware upgrade.
The good news - the tags all seem to work - I'll update the appropriate thread after some more testing; and my replacement pi-zero w's should arrive tomorrow, so I can stop fiddling.

I'd expect major s/w and or o/s upgrades to affect things, but this one seemed minor. It also took me a couple of hours to work out why the pibeacons weren't being recognised any more. Hence the warning.

I am liking piBeacon - thanks for the work involved.

-- Paul --

Posted on
Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:17 am
Hackencrash offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

I've just done an hciconfig -a on one of my rPi's and indeed my address was 43:43:A1:12:1F:AC after having previously done a sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. This is the reported bad address mentioned in the link posted above.

I noticed that the issue had been closed, so I took a chance and rolled-forward by doing another dist-upgrade and noticed it updating a Bluetooth library.

The update didn't prompt for a reboot, and only after rebooting did it change my address (now B8:27:EB:E6:28:83 which I guess is OK).

I'm not even out of bed yet waking up to this issue trying to fix it by ssh'ing from my phone.

Today is going to be a bad day!


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Posted on
Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:39 am
Hackencrash offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

Yep, 2 out of 3 of my rPi's were affected by this.

pi-bluetooth now upgraded to latest (fixed) version.

Right, breakfast...


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Posted on
Fri Aug 25, 2017 9:25 am
forestfield offline
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Re: Caution - raspbian jessie update 'bricks' pibeacon.

There's also a patched version of /usr/bin/btuart available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_P-i4 ... sp=sharing (as per the link in the first post) that fixes this as well - but needs a reboot.

I now have 4 proper piBeacons running on pi zero w's, and I can revert my pi3 to testing the pi version of a mythtv frontend.

Hint
The usb output on the back of an airport will power a pi-zero w
As will the usb output of a pi2.

The latter seems a bit cannabalistic, but the pi2 drives 7 segment, a 14 segment and two 8x8 bicolour displays, as well as reading temp, humidity, luminance all via i2c. It also provides a network to serial connection to control my meridian kit via the cynical network plugin! The pi zero just sits on top of the pi2's case!

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