Blackmagic Forum

Hello,

I have been having issues connecting my Ursa Mini Pro to a desktop PC using a bluetooth dongle which plugs into one of the USB ports. The camera gets successfully paired but then connection drops immediately between the two. Also I tried connecting to my laptop which has Windows 10 too and there I wasn't even able to pair the two devices. I have however successfully connected my Android phone to the camera and the connection was stable. Is this a known issue or I am missing some step when it comes to Windows 10? The bluetooth dongle that I am using is running on bluetooth v4, but it is backwards compatible to all of the previous software versions too.

I want to establish this connection between my PC and camera so that I can develop some software to control the camera remotely over bluetooth.


Kind Regards,
Meelis

Not sure if the bluetooth was ever ment for other use then phone, ipad..

How would it differ from bluetooth on Desktop PC ?

Hi Meelis,

I would first check that your bluetooth dongle supports Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) protocol. It differs from the Bluetooth (classic) protocol. Almost all smartphones will support Bluetooth LE due to the lower power requirements, however many modern laptops will have dual mode receivers.

Regards
Cameron

Hi Cameron,

Thanks for the reply! Is there any particular dongle you could suggest me to buy which supports BLE protocol?


Cheers,
Meelis

Hi, can I jump in and ask if there was any progress on this?

I'm experiencing the same problem with the Pocket 4K dropping the Bluetooth connection a few seconds after connecting successfully on two different machines (one Windows 10 and one Windows 11).

I've checked my USB Bluetooth adapter (TP-Link UB500) and it supports Bluetooth Low Energy. I've checked on the datasheet (see reference on page 3):
https://static.tp-link.com/2021/202105/ ... 6/UB500(UN)_1.0%20Datasheet.pdf

I've also checked the device properties within Windows and it shows BLE support:



Camera firmware 7.3 (latest I can see that is for the Pocket 4K).

When connecting from my Android phone (Galaxy S20 FE) the camera shows that a connection is being maintained. Oddly, the phone doesn't list the camera as connected via Bluetooth after a very short while, though I can continue using an Android App (BlueConnect) to control the camera.

As a developer, I'd really like to make a Windows app for control of the camera over Bluetooth - any help is appreciated.

Hi,
If it is a USB adapter (even some laptops built in Bluetooth can be on the usb bus rather than PCIe), find the USB hub in device manager and disable power management options from properties.
Otherwise try changing the Windows Power Plan to high performance to see if that keeps the connection up.

Ian Morrish wrote:Hi,
If it is a USB adapter (even some laptops built in Bluetooth can be on the usb bus rather than PCIe), find the USB hub in device manager and disable power management options from properties.
Otherwise try changing the Windows Power Plan to high performance to see if that keeps the connection up.

Thanks Ian for that quick reply. I disabled power management on my 4 x USB Root Hubs (disabling "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power") and I had more success on being able to connect to the camera and subscribe to the services and characteristics. It took a couple of attempts before it stuck.

I then re-enabled the power settings on the USB Root Hubs and restarted my computer. I un-paired the camera (via Windows Settings) and tried again, which included Pairing the device, and it managed to stick this time and I could see and connect to the services and characteristics. So, rather odd, and I can't explain why it's connecting every time now.

However, the power settings helped me establish that initial connection, so thank you!

---

Continuing on my investigation - I found that if I tried to connect and pair the camera via the Windows Bluetooth settings my application would be able to see the services that the camera has but it wouldn't be able to subscribe to any characteristic events.

However, if I unpaired the camera (from the Windows Bluetooth settings) and paired the camera in the application instead, then I was able to successfully subscribe to service/characteristic events.

I'm using Microsoft's Bluetooth Low Energy example applications for this (if anyone is interested in going down this path):
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sample ... uetoothle/

Note: I tried the C++/WinRT version but it didn't pair correctly (no number entry to pair). The C# version worked.

This was with power management enabled on the USB Root Hubs. So, this seems to be a good place to start.

---

I'll continue to work with it, based on Microsoft's code base and see how far I can get.

Thanks for your help Ian!