Insignia NS-PCY5BMA Bluetooth 4.0, Macintosh Yosemite 10.10.2, and Handoff
Posted on 19th May 2015
With the release of Yosemite and iOS 8.1, came a new way to connect the many Apple devices that one person can have. This method known as Continuity and Handoff allows a phone call to be answered on a Macintosh computer and transferred to an iPhone along with access to continuing to edit an email from one device to another. These are just a couple of examples of Apple’s new feature set. See Apple’s explanation here.
The feature is designed to work only with newer model Macs and can leave some of us, including Hackintoshers, out of the mix. The requirements call for Bluetooth 4.0 and certain WiFi chipsets to natively enable the feature. Some work from the community has given us the “Continuity Activation Enabler” for older Macs and can even work for some Hackintoshes that have a Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor that is natively support Out of the Box in Yosemite. A cheap Bluetooth adaptor can be found in a lot of places online, but local availability of a solution can be limited.
Best Buy sells at least one Bluetooth 4.0 dongle under their in-house brand Insignia model NS-PCY5BMA. Luckily for us, it sports the Broadcom BCM20702A0 chipset which OS X Yosemite supports, but just not in the Insignia flavor. To enable Handoff, we must get a working Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor at the start. The Insignia one can be used after it is enabled in OS X. What we will look at today is how to get OS X to recognize this adaptor, and then activate the Handoff feature. This guide should work for any adaptor that has the BCM20702A0, but is not recognized under the Bluetooth section in the System Information window.