[BRLTTY] Brailliant Bi40X and bluetooth

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Isabel Ruffell on 2025/05/05 at 19:58 +0100]

>2. After pairing the device on the computer (I have tried this with bluetoothctl, blueman-manager, and through GNOME settings at different times) the device appears in the list of "Connected Devices" on the BI 40X [that is, both in the Terminal application and in the Options / Bluetooth menu.

I wonder if that means that there's an atual connection or just that it's in the paired devices list.

>3a. If I initiate a connection from the computer (from any of those programs), it goes into the connect/disconnect cycle. This through  some uninformative dialog boxes or similar.

Just guessing that requesting a connection causes it to try an rfcomm (i.e. Bluetooth serial) connection, which the BI40X doesn't support.

>3b: "Brailliant BI40X Disconnected". If I initiate the connection from the BI 40X, by selecting the connection there, it simply says "Braille Display". 

That's probably correct, though I don't personally have a BI40X in order to verify. I think it's simply telling you that it's now in Braille Display mode. That text will then be overwritten as soon as the screen reader on the host writes to it.

>As a side-effect, thelast does also disrupt the speech on both the BI40X 

I think that's also expected given that the BI40X has switched into its braille display mode. This is because everything would now be under the control of the host's screen reader.

>and the computer (via orca).

I'm not sure why that'd be.

>It is the distribution's package. I have not compiled anything. 

Maybe Debian (I think you said that's what you're using) doesn't build brltty such that it includes HID support.

>But, just to reiterate: it works via usb, 

Yes, because brltty supports HID via USB internally.

>and I could get the BrailleNote Touch working via bluetooth. 

Yes, because it uses rfcomm (i.e. Bluetooth serial).

>It may be no more than that this unit does not do anything with a PIN as the older unit did. The pairing with the BI40X is less involved, although I don't know how far that affects anything under the hood. (I remember this being flagged in the docs but that was a while ago.)

No, that wouldn't matter. The PIN is only needed (or not needed) during pairing.

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