bluetoothctl does not show bluetooth low energy (BLE) device

Question

I would like to pair my Bluetooth Low Energy Sport Watch (Suunto Ambit 3) to my Raspberry PI 3 B V1.2 I am using the RaspianOS Version 10 buster with kernel Version 5.4.79-v7+ This OS contains the bluez stack in version 5.50 which was installed from a predefined package via apt-get.

Usually the ble pairing is done with smartphones under android and IOS. When doing the pairing process the watch offers a pincode which has to be entered by the smartphone. With nRFConnect app under android the pairing works fine. When I am running the hcitool on my raspberry and the watch is in pairing mode it appears.

sudo hcitool -i hci0 lescan

but when i try to run the sudo bluetoothctl command with scan on my device does not appear and pairing with the correct mac address does not work either. Other devices still appear in bluetoothctl I also had a look into https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3689 but this seems that this is only related to newer raspberry pi models.

Do have any idea what hinders my device from being found in the bluetoothctl scan mode or what can I do to pair my device with pin code enabled?

Answer 1

I found a solution by myself.

inside bluetoothctl calling the following sequence

menu scan
transport le
back
scan on

finally enables bluetoothctl to find my watch. The connect command is then also working.