Xiaomi's MiBand is incompabible with Cyanogenmod 13 (and Android 6.0 in general)

This is the first of two posts about my new Xiaomi Mi Band.

For those of you who do not know what that is, it is a $15 Fitness tracker from Xiaomi. Basically a Chinese OEM which manufactures quality phones for low prices.

It was on sale, I got it for $10 dollars including free shipping. It was a steal.

I got it, downloaded the MiFit app, could pair with it okay, and even got some data about a few steps I took inside the house. Everything seemed to work fine, except that it never synced again with the phone.

The logical step is to unpair the band and start all over again, it makes perfect sense, right? WRONG!!!

I was greeted by a message stating that there were too many devices nearby. The logical next step is to Google for what the heck that means, and then I read tons of posts suggesting everything from  going to the middle of nowhere and attempting to pair the band - you need ZERO interference, mate! - to others suggesting that you do a factory reset on the phone, losing hours of work just to get a $. 10  piece of electronics to work, makes sense, right? Naturally, none of these methods worked.

I had nothing but an elegant piece of metal and plastic that was not even qualified to be a paper weight due to its weighing no more than a couple of grams.

Some websites suggested taking it to a service center, where they just replace it because it seems to be a widespread issue that can be considered a manufacturing defect. Just pay $20 top have it shipped back, costing twice what it had originally cost me? I will pass.

The solutions that made sense involved unpairing the band and resetting the Bluetooth information of the phone by erasing the cache, forcing the Bluetooth service to stop, and then opening the Xiaomi <I Fit app and allowing it to turn the Bluetooth back on. Did not work.

I decided to try pairing it with an Android 5.1 Galaxy Tab S2. The app in Google Play states that the Tab S2 is incompatible so had to download the app from Xiaomi's website. Then I still kept getting the too many devices message there as well.

I even tried the app on a Blackberry 10, still did not work.

So, I thought it must be something with the device refusing to pair. Some people suggested putting it in the freezer and letting it sit there for three days in order to drain the battery or just wait till the battery goes dead. The tiny 41 mAh battery only takes a month to die!

To make a long story short, it worked with my Tab S2, after deleting the cache of the Bluetooth service, stopping it, and making the Mi Fit app turn the Bluetooth back on. The trick was, I needed to set a new account up, that was the only difference, and that's the only thing that made it work.

I tried to unpair it and pair it again with the phone with CM 13 on it, did not work, still the same error. Blackberry 10 also still did not work. Thankfully, it did pair again with the tablet right away, and is back to being a little accelerometer that counts how many steps you take and how many hours of sleep you get at night.