Coffee shop kills my bluetooth

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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1

For the second time at the same coffee shop my bluetooth has stopped working, on the system its self. after waking from standby my mouse connected and it was working fine with out any issue in lag or loss of signal.

i standby-ed my laptop to grab my coffee and when i woke it my bluetooth icon was gone, system settings showed bluetooth off, clicking on did move to on but no change, bluetooth is gone.

this has only happend twice and in the same coffee shop over having this laptop for 3-4 years??

it is very busy, current count on the network is 60 devices… so maybe its a radio issue??

2

Try to reproduce the error there multiple times in a row.
If you succeed at that go somewhere else and try again.

Twice without a control isn’t a pattern.

3 Likes
3

noted, ill see if it is working when i get home.

last time this happened i ran down the rabbit hole trying to fix it while here, failed, then later it was “just working”

ill come back a few times to see if its something in the area

4

Bluetooth is notoriously buggy on Linux. (although, it’s been getting better) Did you receive updates that could explain the change in functionality?

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@SgtAwesomesauce nope, last time i updated would have been at least a week ago

and as i thought at this point, back home and the icon is back up on my bar, mouse connected instantly

something about that coffee shop or area kills my BT, i think it busy radio but idk at this point, will look for this next time i go. will note if number of wifi devices makes difference there or other places

1 Like
6

So does the BT radio detect devices and fail to pair with your device or is it just unable to detect anything at all?

It’s possible someone’s doing something untoward.

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so far both times this has happened were at the same coffee shop. BT system level simply appears to turn off or otherwise be completely unavailable.

ive been to that coffee shop a number of times but i will say it was exceptionally busy today

8

Hmm, did you bring your laptop out of sleep or was it a cold boot?

Also, do you know what BT adapter you have? Lots of BT adapters for laptops have intermittent issues coming out of sleep and that could be the cause of your issues.

I feel like I’m stabbing at ghosts here though. Hard to know what’s material without more info.

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It think it’s because there is too much interference with the wi-fi signals and several users, so the bluetooth just dropped completely. It happened to me several time when I was walking through the cafeteria and my Bluetooth earbuds often lost the signal several time.

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i agree, what bothers me is that the BT isnt even gray in my status area. my laptop acts as though i dont have BT hardware at all

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Enough, is enough. Hack the goddamn coffee vending machine like a dude did for 20 (or how long it was) years before getting caught. On a serious note, older bluetooth (pre v3?) in general does not have great connectivity or at least for me. What bluetooth version are you using? Also populated channels could be the reason, have no idea if it’s possible for wifi to interfere with bluetooth signals

12

My understanding was that bluetooth used different frequencies. Not sure though.

1 Like
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they are both VERY near each other, i think BT is 2.4Ghz

14

Interference is definitely possible then, however, not likely.

15

A microwave can kill your wifi, so several wifi clients can definitely disturb your bluetooth signal, especially if it’s an older less powerful implementation of bluetooth.

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might not be related but
my bluetooth also trascended from this plane of existence (no longer listed when lsusb) after I installed powertop, the solution was not using powertop and blacklisting the device from sleeping on the tlp settings.