Bluetooth does not work with Raspbian Stretch and Raspberry Pi 3

Question

On a new install of Raspbian Stretch, log in and with the first command of systemctl status bluetooth, I get:

$ systemctl status bluetooth
● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Fri 2017-08-18 01:37:37 UTC; 1s ago
     Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
 Main PID: 667 (bluetoothd)
   Status: "Running"
   CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service
           └─667 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd

Aug 18 01:37:37 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Starting Bluetooth service...
Aug 18 01:37:37 raspberrypi bluetoothd[667]: Bluetooth daemon 5.43
Aug 18 01:37:37 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Started Bluetooth service.
Aug 18 01:37:37 raspberrypi bluetoothd[667]: Starting SDP server
Aug 18 01:37:38 raspberrypi bluetoothd[667]: Bluetooth management interface 1.14 initialized
Aug 18 01:37:38 raspberrypi bluetoothd[667]: Failed to obtain handles for "Service Changed" characteristic
Aug 18 01:37:38 raspberrypi bluetoothd[667]: Sap driver initialization failed.
Aug 18 01:37:38 raspberrypi bluetoothd[667]: sap-server: Operation not permitted (1)

Consequently, bluetoothctl doesn't detect any devices.

This didn't happen with Raspbian Jessie. Any pointers on how to resolve this?

Answer 1

I just hit the same issue. The errors from the bluetooth service are red herrings. The problem (for me, anyway) was that the permissions required to access the service over DBus have changed.

As regular user:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ busctl tree org.bluez
Failed to introspect object / of service org.bluez: Access denied
No objects discovered.

As root:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo busctl tree org.bluez
└─/org
  └─/org/bluez
    └─/org/bluez/hci0

Checked /etc/dbus-1/system.d/bluetooth.conf, which says users must be in the bluetooth group.

Add user to group:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo adduser pi bluetooth
Adding user `pi' to group `bluetooth' ...
Adding user pi to group bluetooth
Done.
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ newgrp bluetooth

Now it works:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ busctl tree org.bluez
└─/org
  └─/org/bluez
    └─/org/bluez/hci0
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ bluetoothctl 
[NEW] Controller 43:43:A1:12:1F:AC raspberrypi [default]