Ubertooth Mac Installation Notes

Installation notes for the Ubertooth Bluetooth test tool on Mac OS X 10.9.3.

Installation was strait forward with a glitch or two from the description described on the Ubertooth site, so I've documented the process here for my own notes.

Project site: http://ubertooth.sourceforge.net/

Note the wiki: https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/wiki

Getting started URL: https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/wiki/Build-Guide

With some help from the troubleshooting guide, here: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/wiki/troubleshooting.


Get PySide & QT if you want to run the spectrum analyzer demo:
http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide_Binaries_MacOSX

Install Brew the Mac package manager if you don't yet have it:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"

Brew installation failed, so I (hesitatingly) changed /usr/local permissions:

sudo chowbn -R j2:admin /usr/local

Install prerequisites:

brew install libusb wget cmake

...including PyUSB:

wget https://github.com/walac/pyusb/archive/1.0.0b1.tar.gz -O pyusb-1.0.0b1.tar.gz
tar xvf pyusb-1.0.0b1.tar.gz
cd pyusb-1.0.0b1
sudo python setup.py install

The next step of installing libbtbb failed because a missing package:

brew install pkg-config

then libbtbb still couldn't install correctly, because of the failed partial installation. Uninstalling, didn't work, but manually removing the files from /usr/local/lib and the header file btbb.h in /usr/local/include. worked.

I was then able to install libbtbb:

wget https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/libbtbb/archive/2014-02-R2.tar.gz -O libbtbb-2014-02-R2.tar.gz
tar xf libbtbb-2014-02-R2.tar.gz
cd libbtbb-2014-02-R2
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Then, I was able to continue with the installation as described on Ubertooth site:

wget https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/archive/2014-02-R2.tar.gz -O ubertooth-2014-02-R2.tar.gz
tar xf ubertooth-2014-02-R2.tar.gz
cd ubertooth-2014-02-R2/host
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Then upgrade firmware of device. Mine shipped with a previous version of the firmware. So using the firmware provided in the source tree, and following these directions, this worked for me.

$ubertooth-util -v
    Firmware revision: 2012-10-R1

$cd ubertooth-2014-02-R2/ubertooth-one-firmware-bin

$ ubertooth-dfu --write bluetooth_rxtx.dfu
    Checking firmware signature
    No DFU devices found - attempting to find Ubertooth devices

    1) Found 'Ubertooth One' with USB ID: 1d50:6002

    Select a device to flash (default:1, exit:0):
             .............................................................................................................................................
    Write complete
$ ubertooth-dfu --detach
    Detached$ ubertooth-util -v
    Firmware revision: 2014-02-R2
$ ubertooth-util -V
    ubertooth 2014-02-R2 (dominicgs@mercury) Thu Feb 20 13:28:01 GMT 2014