Connecting Vortex Tab 75 via bluetooth in Linux

January 10, 2020

Vortex Tab 75 can be connected to PC via cable or bluetooth. But in some cases keyboard won’t connect to pc. It will pair and almost immediatly disconnect.Problem is with bletooth agent.

How to connect vortex tab 75 to linux pc:

We will use bluetoothctl. Open this application in terminal;
Unpair keyboard if it has been already paired with command unpair {MAC};
Add new agent with command agent NoInputNoOutput;
Switch to default agent with command defaut-agent;
Switch keyboard into pairing mode (Pn + J/K/L);
On PC start scan for new devices with scan on in bluetoothctl;
After keyboard found - pair it ether with pair {MAC} or connect {MAC};
Now we can stop scan with scan off.

After this pairing procedure keyboard should work fine. Reconnecting will work fine too, but until reboot (because we need to add agent on each bluez restart).

Future step is to create rule for enabling bluetooth NoInputNoOutput agent on boot or user login (if we do not need to enter password via vortex tab, of course). As a basic this script can be used.

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
set prompt "#"
spawn sudo bluetoothctl
sleep 1
expect -re $prompt
sleep 1
send "agent NoInputNoOutput\r"
sleep 2
expect "Agent registered"
send "default-agent\r"
expect -re $prompt
sleep 3
interact
expect eof

linux