Unable to read the mac address from hci0

[francozappa]

Hi,

I'm trying to run blue_hydra on Arch Linux.
I've followed the installation steps (installing the deps and running the bundle install command).

However when I try to run the execution commands (sudo bundle exec ./bin/blue_hydra)
I'm getting the following message:

Unable to read the mac address from hci0

p.s. maybe you can specify in your README that the command has to be run with sudo or similar?

Thanks

[sstelfox]

Thanks for reaching out. My first guess is your bluetooth device isn't showing up. Could you check the output of hciconfig -a and make sure hci0 is showing up? And yes the README could use a little work, it does require root privileges to run.

[francozappa]

Hey @sstelfox ,

The problem is that recent versions of bluez in the Arch repo deprecated the hci* tools. There is a package in the AUR called bluez-utils-compat that should contain the hci* tools, however it uses an older version of bluez and I'm not sure if is a good idea to install it. I guess that the error that I'm getting is related to the fact that your tool is not finding some hci tool?
Maybe I can install your tool on an Ubuntu VM?

Thanks!

[sstelfox]

Unfortunately blue_hydra relies on the hci* tools internally, if they're missing that would definitely cause it to not work. I haven't ever tried running blue_hydra in a VM, but if you get the hardware passthrough working it should be fine. I wish you the best of luck if you try that route!