Pairing an Apple keyboard with a Raspberry Pi

Set up your hardware

You’ll want to plug your bluetooth adapter directly into your Raspberry Pi. That will give you with a more reliable connection then running it off a powered USB hub.

If your Apple keyboard’s already paired with something, unpair it. Once it’s unpaired, you can turn it on and see the LED flash three times in succession. That means your keyboard’s in discovery mode and can be seen by your Pi.

Finally, you’ll need to have a USB keyboard plugged into your Pi so you can type stuff in at the command prompt.

Get your adapter working

You want to make sure the bluetooth package is installed and up to date. You’ll also need the bluez-utils package, since it provides some convenient command line tools. Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi’s OS, is Debian based, sod you can do all this with apt-get.

apt-get update
apt-get install bluetooth
apt-get install bluez-utils

It takes a while for the bluetooth package to install, since it’s got a lot of recommended packages. Feel free to use the “–no-install-recommends” flag with it if you want to speed up the process. You can also install the blueman package if you like having GUI tools to manage your devices.

apt-get install blueman

Once everything’s installed, run the lsusb command to make sure your bluetooh adapter’s found. If you’re using a Cirago adapter, you’ll see a line about a “Cambridge Silicon Radio” device.

lsusb | grep -i bluetooth

Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0a12:0001
Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI Mode)

Finally, use the hcitool command to search for your Apple keyboard.

hcitool scan

Scanning ...
92:83:1D:BD:A9:07 Apple Wireless Keyboard

The six digit hexidecimal number that shows up is the ID for your keyboard. Write it down, since you’ll need it for the pairing process.

Pair your keyboard

The bluez-simple-agent tool can be used to pair your Apple keyboard with your Raspberry Pi. Give it the ID of your keyboard as an argument.

bluez-simple-agent 92:83:1D:BD:A9:07

When you’re prompted to enter a pin number, type a 4 digit numeric code into your USB keyboard and press return. The PIN code you enter doesn’t matter, so pick something like 1234. Then type the same PIN code into your Apple keyboard and press return.

You want your Pi to remember that your keyboard’s paired with it so it will connect to that keyboard when it boots. You can tell your Pi to trust your keyboard with the bluez-test-device command.

bluez-test-device trusted 92:83:1D:BD:A9:07

Finally, you’ll need to connect your keyboard to your Pi so that it responds to key presses. Use the bluez-test-input command for that.

bluez-test-input connect 92:83:1D:BD:A9:07

Once you’ve got your Apple keyboard paired, trusted, and conneted, you can unplug your USB keyboard and reboot your Pi. If your Pi doesn’t immediately pick up your Apple keyboard on boot, you can prompt it to connect my pressing any key. The LED will flash once, and then you can type normally.