Use a bluetooth speaker and bluetooth keyboard simultaneously?

Help and Support
1

Hi,

I have a raspberry Pi Zero and I’d like to know if the bluetooth dongle that is sold here on OSMC (Bluetooth dongle - OSMC) can be used to connect to a bluetooth speaker and a bluetooth keyboard at the same time. Of course I would need 2 bluetooth dongles - one for the speaker and one for the keybard.

Thanks.

2

It’s technically possible to pair one receiver with multiple devices.

I believe it’s possible using BlueZ 5.x (we ship 5.3.x currently) to pair with multiple devices.

But there is no possibility for RX/TX on both devices at the same time. With two keyboards, this might not be an issue, but if you were using audio and the keyboard at the same time it would cause problems such as audio dropouts.

So if your intention is to buy one dongle and connect to multiple devices, then it cannot be recommended.

Two dongles would work fine however, but would require a bit of command line set up to pair each device with an individual controller. You just pair the two devices with the two individual dongles.

Sam

3

Is there any article or forum post where I can read up on how to set up these two bluetooth components (via the command line) with 2 individual dongles. I’d like to be sure that I can pair them before buying 2 separate bluetooth dongles.

Thanks
Zarko

4

I doubt that there is a forum entry with a detailed explanation but check out the below entry just ignore the apt-get installation steps as I assume you have all packages already as you followed the A2DP thread. Just check out bluetoothctl.

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