Raspberry Pi 4 initial setup

Support
1

Please can you advise me?

I am considering buying a Raspberry Pi 4.

I intend to use it as an alternative desktop computer.

Now,

I already have a really nice monitor with HDMI input.

I also have a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse.

I’m wondering, during the initial bootup of a new Raspberry Pi, would the device detect my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, or would I need a USB keyboard and mouse to undertake the initial setup?

2

The initial bootup doesn’t offer to detect Bluetooth devices, as far as I recall, but there’s another way you can do it if you already have another computer.

  1. Use the Raspberry Pi Imager app (from the Raspberry Pi official site) to put the latest Raspberry Pi OS image onto your microSD card. When doing you, you can choose to pre-fill your wi-fi info, and also enable the VNC server by default. You should do both of those things, and let Imager write the appropriate OS image to your card.
  2. Boot your Pi with the card inserted. It’ll connect to your wi-fi network, and VNC will be enabled.
  3. Get a VNC viewer app for your other computer (lots to choose from, often free), and use it to connect to your Pi. Now you can control the Pi’s desktop/UI from your other computer, and set up your Bluetooth devices.

If for some reason you don’t want to do that, the other option is to pre-enable your Pi’s SSH server when you’re configuring the boot image in Imager, then once the Pi boots you can SSH into it from a terminal on your other computer, and use bluetoothctl to set up your Bluetooth devices.

3

I have a microsoft bluetooth keyboard with mouse pad and to test it I just plugged the dongle into my Pi4-8 ,I oppened command prompt and just started typing no issue,I didn’t check anything else

4

Hi, My keyboard didn’t come with a dongle. I was hoping to connect to the Bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi direct.

5

I have a microsoft bluetooth keyboard with mouse pad and to test it I just plugged the dongle into my Pi4-8 ,I oppened command prompt and just started typing no issue,I didn’t check anything else

That’s because your keyboard is already factory-paired with the dongle, and the dongle just acts as a generic USB keyboard device. Bluetooth doesn’t require dongles unless the host machine doesn’t have Bluetooth hardware itself. Your dongle is probably an RF device rather than Bluetooth specifically, and the keyboard probably supports both modes.

6

Just a coincidence, but today I read the release notes for the current version of PiOS and it says:

  • Improved detection of Bluetooth HID devices in first-boot wizard

So they are at least working on it. Maybe it is worth a try. Please share your results.