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I have a rooted HTC Wildfire phone (no SIM), a Pi and a bluetooth dongle and an empty wallet.

I want to get my Pi connected to the internet without an Ethernet cable (due to location) and without buying a usb wireless adapter (due to the empty wallet).

I've found a few apps that can share an internet connection via bluetooth on Android such as PdaNet 3.50 and I believe later versions of Android have it built in.

I've managed to get the bluetooth dongle working on the Pi and I can hcitool scan and find the Wildfire. I'm fairly confident I can get them paired too, which I'd imagine is the next stage.

Once paired, I'm totally stuck as to what I should be doing next. Assuming I start the PdaNet app and get it to start sharing, what do I do after that (on the Pi)?

Everything I've read so far talks about using the phone as a modem (i think?) when I want to use the phone's WiFi connection, not its 4G/3G/whatever connection.

I'm a Windows user so be nice. :)

George Duckett
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  • Hate to burst your bubble, but BlueTooth can only really get you ~85KB/S and would make for an awfully slow means for accessing internet. – Alexander Aug 28 '12 at 18:58
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    Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR will get you 2.1 Mbps which would be useable for most internet applications. Won't be blazing fast, but it will be usable. Assuming @XAleXOwnZX meant 85 KiloBytes/s, that still isn't too bad, as that's about 0.66 Mbps, which isn't great, but much better than 56 kbit/s like the old modem I used to browse on. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth#Uses – Kibbee Aug 29 '12 at 00:14
  • 2.1 megaBITs per seconds is around 0.21 megaBYTES (you divid by 10 rather than 8, in order to roughly account for overhead), so still not that great lol. (i've never seen more then 85 KB/s in my use of ) Even still, it's very power inefficient for the tiny amounts of data it's capable of. – Alexander Aug 29 '12 at 06:41

2 Answers2

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There are two common ways to use BT (and often USB) devices for network. PAN/NAP (looks something like an ethernet chip) and modem emulation. NAP ought to be better, but it seems to be easier to use the modem.

A full-blown desktoppy way these days would probably to use networkmanager and modemmanager and the matching GUI bits.

Without all that, I've found wvdial makes it easy to dial 3G modems.

There should be a way to connect to BT NAP by commands alone. I don't know/remember how that works (but see links below).

Getting to the modem (emulation), I believe you use rfcomm to open a "serial port" to the phone. Then just use that device as a modem.

How you select between networks (3G/4G/wifi) etc. depends on your phone and phone settings. You may need the APN from your service provider's instructions in the PI's settings but shouldn't need to enter the PIN. The phone number dialed usually selects a profile from your phone's settings to use.

Either way, you'll of course need to connect/pair the phone and the computer succesfully. I think that's the place to start. :)

Try these:

XTL
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So according to you, you want to tether your Htc phone with the pi and share the wifi connection with it, I really don't know about the bluetooth thing but I tethered my Htc Explorer with my pi via usb cable and it is an easy process! There are only 2 steps involved

  1. Enable Wifi on your phone.

  2. Connect it with a usb cable to your pi and select USB tethering and in the terminal type

    sudo dhclient usb0 and it will provide Internet access to the Pi

Hope it helps you!

Read this post for more.

Matt
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Palash Taneja
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