/raspi-wireless-speaker

A wireless speaker system built with a Raspberry Pi

Primary LanguageShellDo What The F*ck You Want To Public LicenseWTFPL

Raspberry PI wireless speaker

I created this to use a Raspberry Pi Zero W together with a pair of speakers that already contain an USB sound card (Alesis iM1Active 520USB) for audio playback via both UPNP/DLNA and Bluetooth A2DP.

Manual configuration of such a setup is quite simple, but this somewhat automates and documents it.

This was tested on the base of 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-lite. upmpdcli is used as UPNP renderer, mopidy as media player backend, pulseaudio for bluetooth A2DP. Some additional stuff (pavucontrol...) is installed to allow easy setup via SSH / X-Forwarding.

To apply the configuration, just do the following:

  • write 2020-02-13-raspbian-buster-lite.img to a SDCard
  • mount partition 1 of the SD card, touch /mnt/ssh, this enables sshd on first boot.
  • Connect HDMI Display and Keyboard to the PI, boot up the SD card.
  • Log on, sudo raspi-config. Configure the following to your needs:
    • Wireless Lan
    • Hostname (This hostname is used for the Bluetooth name and for the UPNP friendly name)
    • Timezone
    • Keyboard layout

For convenience, copy your ssh key to the pi: ssh-copy-id pi@raspi. Use make dist to create the insatllation tarball, then scp raspi-multimedia.tar.gz pi@raspi:.

Log on to the Pi, then:

  • tar xf raspi-multimedia.tar.gz
  • cd target
  • ./deploy.sh

Note that I have deliberately left enabled the confirmation prompts of the apt package installer, so you'll have to answer "yes" a few times.

This should end with

no errors detected
now reboot and check if everything works

hopefully, and afterwards everything should just work :-)

Note that you might have to log on once with ssh -Y pi@raspi pavucontrol and configure your output device. I have, for example, just disabled the internal sound card completely, so that the external USB sound card is always used.

Have a lot of fun...

Some technical remarks...

  • Bluez uses simple pairing, if the adapter supports it. In this case, you do not get prompted for a PIN during pairing. If the adapter does not support it, then the PIN is hard coded to "0000" in mini-agent.py. The bluetooth adapters in Raspi Zero W and Raspberry Pi 3 do support sspmode, but if you build this with an Raspberry Pi with an older USB BT dongle, it might not be supported. Check the output of hciconfig get sspmode. If you just get an error, then it is not supported.

  • The services are running in a session of user "pi", because pulseaudio does not really want to run as root. To achieve this, autologin for "pi" on tty1 is enabled.

  • The services started (mopidy, mini-agent.py for bluez and the automatic volume adjuster for pulseaudio) are managed by systemd in user-mode. This was chosen mainly, so that restart=always can be used to respawn failing processes.

  • upmpdcli is running with the default setup in system mode, just friendlyname is changed.

The license of all files is WTFPL-2.0, except mini-agent, which, as it is derived from bluez sources, is probably GPL-2.0+.