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I bought one of those tiny bluetooth USB dongles that you can plug on a PC and make bluetooth communications. I am wondering if I just plug this dongle to a USB power source, like the USB charger that comes with iPad, can the bluetooth dongle power up, and be discovered as a bluetooth device? This sounds reasonable, since the bluetooth dongle should be able to broadcast itself, at least using some low-level protocol, i.e. showing its Mac address.

However, I tried to do the following:

1.Plug the bluetooth dongle on my iPad's usb charger 2.Search bluetooth devices on my laptop

and I could not find it. Is it because the bluetooth dongle needs the PC to initialize it, so that it can be discovered? Or I am not doing it right?

Thanks

sdera
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    The dongle itself would be useless without the PC. It's the PC's bluetooth drivers/configuration that determines what services are available and how to identify itself. You'll note that your pc doesn't show up as "Brand XYZ dongle" when looking for devices, it's "My Pc" or whatever you've named it. You may detect that a bluetooth radio is present, but the dongle is an empty shell without the PC. – Marc B May 16 '11 at 21:10
  • Thanks Marc B, I think detect the dongle's bluetooth radio is good enough - I do not need to find a name for the dongle, just its Mac address. Question edited to reflect this. – sdera May 16 '11 at 22:27
  • @sdera, were you able to detect the mac address of the dongle? have a project in mind which implements something similar. – canopi Jul 11 '14 at 09:05

1 Answers1

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It depend on the dongle Typical PC dongles depends on the host (pc) to initialize and start any bluetooth activity - including scanning etc

It is practically possible to make dongles that can start becoming discoverable without waiting for host initialization. This has to be a custom build

Dennis Mathews
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