Category: Tech

Recently I’ve been playing with how to build a Bluetooth audio device using a Raspberry Pi Zero. The following are some notes on what I found.

First question is why build one when you can buy one for way less than the cost of the parts. There are a couple of reasons:

• I build IoT prototypes for a living, and the best way to get a feel for the challenges is to actually face them.
• Hacking on stuff is fun.

The Hardware

I’m starting out with a standard Raspberry Pi Zero W. This gets me a base high level platform that includes a WiFi and Bluetooth.

The one thing that’s missing is an audio output (apart from the HDMI) but Raspberry Pi’s support audio using the I²S standard. There are several I²S pHATs available and I’m going to be using a pHAT DAC from Pimoroni. I’ve used these before for a project so I’m reasonably happy with how to set it up, but Pimoroni have detailed instructions.

I’m going to add a screen to show things like the current track title & artist along with the volume. I’m also going to need some buttons to send Play/Pause, Next & Previous commands to the connected device. I have a PaPiRus e-ink display that has 5 buttons built in which I was going to use but this clashes with the GPIO pins used for the DAC so instead I’ve opted for the Inky pHAT and the Button Shim.

The Software

I knew the core components of this had to be a problem others had solved and this proved to be the case. After a little bit of searching I found this project on github.

As part of the configuration we need to generate the Bluetooth Class bitmask. This can be done one this site.

This outputs a hex value of 0x24043C which is added to the /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

With this up and running I had a basic Bluetooth speaker that any phone can connect to without a pin and play music, but nothing else. The next step is to add some code to handle the button pushes and to update the display.

The Bluetooth stack on Linux is controlled and configured using DBus. Dbus is a messaging system supporting IPC and RPC

A bit of Googling round turned up this askubuntu question that got me started with the following command:

dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.bluez /org/bluez/hci0/dev_44_78_3E_85_9D_6F org.bluez.MediaControl1.Play

This sends a Play command to the connected phone with the Bluetooth mac address of 44:78:3E:85:9D:6F. The problem is knowing what the mac address is as the system allows multiple devices to pair with the speaker. Luckily you can use DBus to query the system for the connected device. DBus also has some really good Python bindings. So with a bit more poking around I ended up with this:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import signal
import buttonshim
import dbus
bus = dbus.SystemBus()
manager = dbus.Interface(
bus.get_object("org.bluez","/"), 
"org.freedesktop.DBus.ObjectManager")

@buttonshim.on_press(buttonshim.BUTTON_A)
def playPause(button, pressed):
	objects = manager.GetManagedObjects()
	 
	for path in objects.keys():
	    interfaces = objects[path]
	    for interface in interfaces.keys():
	        if interface in [
	        "orge.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable",
	        "org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties"]:
	            continue
	 
	        if interface == "org.bluez.Device1":
	            props = interfaces[interface]
	            if props["Connected"] == 1:
	                media = objects[path + "/player0"]["org.bluez.MediaPlayer1"]
	 
	                mediaControlInterface = dbus.Interface(
	                bus.get_object("org.bluez",path + "/player0"),
	                "org.bluez.MediaPlayer1")
	 
	                if media["Status"] == "paused":
	                    mediaControlInterface.Play()
	                else:
	                    mediaControlInterface.Pause()

signal.pause()

When button A is pressed this looks up the connected device, and also checks the current state of the player, is it playing or paused and toggles the state. This means that one button can be Play and Pause. It also uses the org.bluez.MediaPlay1 API rather than the org.bluez.MediaControl1 which is marked as deprecated in the doc.

The button shim also comes with Python bindings so putting it all together was pretty simple.

DBus also lets you register to be notified when a property changes, this paired with the Track property on the org.bluez.MediaPlay1 as this holds the Artist, Track Name, Album Name and Track length information supplied by the source. This can be combined with the Inky pHAT python library to show the information on the screen.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import dbus
from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop
from gi.repository import GLib

def trackChanged(*args, **kw):
	target = args[0]
	if target == "org.bluez.MediaPlayer1":
		data = args[1].get("Track",0)
		if data != 0:
			artist = data.get('Artist')
			track = data.get('Title')
			print(artist)
			print(track)


DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)
system_bus = dbus.SystemBus()
system_bus.add_signal_receiver(trackChanged, 
	dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties", 
	signal_name="PropertiesChanged", 
	path='/org/bluez/hci0/dev_80_5A_04_12_03_0E/player0')
loop = GLib.MainLoop()
loop.run()

This code attaches a listener to the MediaPlayer object and when it spots that the Track has changed it prints out the new Artist and Title. The code matches all PropertiesChanged events which is a little messy but I’ve not found a way to use wildcards or partial matches for the DBus interface in python (since we don’t know the mac address of the connected device at the time we start listening for changes).

Converting the Artist/Title information into an image with the Pyton Image Library then getting the Inky pHAT to render that is not too tricky

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
from font_fredoka_one import FredokaOne
from inky import InkyPHAT

...

disp = InkyPHAT("yellow")
font = ImageFont.truetype(FredokaOne, 22)

img = Image.new("P", (inky_display.WIDTH, inky_display.HEIGHT))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img)

draw.text((), "Artist: "+ artist, disp.WHITE, font=font)
draw.text((), "Track: "+ track, disp.WHITE, font=font)

disp.set_image(img)
disp.show()

That’s the basics working, now I need to find/build a case for it and then look at seeing if I can add Chromecast Audio and Airplay support.