I’m not sure what could be wrong here so it may be a hardware failure but there are a few quick things worth checking before declaring the bluetooth dead.
Thanks for confirming you have run:
This guide I have found includes steps to confirm the Bluez service is actually installed and commands to check the status.
What bluetooth device are you trying to connect to your Pi, can you double-check it works with another device so we can isolate the problem to the Pi Zero?
You could check your locale setting is set to Australia, I know this affects your wifi frequencies and may not have an impact on bluetooth, but it doesn’t hurt to check.
Thanks for your reply. I have actually gone through the guide you linked to already and unfortunately it didn’t help. Changing the locale setting also didn’t change anything. Also, I haven’t even gotten to the stage of trying to pair a bluetooth device as bluetooth doesn’t work at all on my RPi. I guess the sad reality that bluetooth is dead on my RPi is starting to sink in
I had a quick look through the forum posts but as they specifically apply to wifi, didn’t see anything that really applied to my case. No obvious signs of damage on the chip either.
I was just about to celebrate with you, still you are one step closer to knowing for sure if it is a hardware fault or a software issue.
In any case, thanks for linking to resources that helped so you may save a headache for someone else in the future.
Were you able to test the bluetooth device you want to pair to the Pi with another piece of hardware just to confirm it isn’t two isolated problems and this is still definitely an issue localised to the Pi Zero?
Myself and a team of undergraduate engineering students once spent 14 hours straight trying to troubleshoot the engine in our little race car not starting - the night before a track day.
Turned out the camshaft sensor we were using was wired backwards to all the others, so the sync pulse was falling edge instead of rising edge!
The thing that really got us off track was that every so often the ECU was happy to consider it synced and would fire a couple of sparks.
@Oliver33 - you’re not going to believe it. After upgrading to Bullseye bluetooth has stopped working again Unbelievable! And my fix above no longer works. I did findsomeinfo online indicating that others have been having similar issues but have tried all these and still can’t fix it.
Sorry to hear about that, Bullseye is known to have some teething issues as the latest release of the Raspberry Pi OS. Are you still running sudo bluetoothctl in order to check whether there are any controllers attached to your Pi within Bullseye?
Just curious to see whether there are any other diagnostic tools we may be able to use here in order to determine what’s going on with it for you (and anyone else reading this in future ).