The PI should "talk" to me over bluetooth speaker, how do I do that?

[Januil]

Hi all,

Since there is a lot o information on the forum, I can't find what I am looking for.
I bought myself a rpi3 to use with my home-automation Domoticz.
This system is running on a pi 2 (Wheezy) for about 3 years very successfully.
Now I want to go to the next step, the system should "talk" to me like;"Good morning it is the 29th of september and the weather is sunny".
For this I bought the rpi 3 and a Bluetooth speaker.
But whatever I do and whatever I try I never come further then about 20 seconds of sound out of the speaker.
Then it stops and even YouTube sticks in the clip I am trying to play.
I am not a specialist in Linux or programming, and I have tried all the suggestions I could find on the internet but I am not coming any further.
Is there a simple wiki or how to to get things working.
I have tried everything on Jessie and Stretch as well.
sound is playing over the jack output well.

Please help
Best regards
Jan

[Januil]

anyone any idea?

[Januil]

really nobody who can help me?

[mlepage]

No idea, but I would try to break the problem down.

Can you pair the speaker to another source (e.g. a phone or automobile) and play for minutes?

Find some simple command line utilities which play sound. Ensure they work through the speaker for minutes, then try bluetooth.

Try to turn on logs for the audio interface, and/or bluetooth. See if there are warnings or errors. E.g. check the output of dmesg command.

Try to borrow another bluetooth speaker and see if you have better luck with it, just to tell if it's the software or not.

[asavah]

Check dmesg output.
If you start seeing bluetooth timeouts in dmesg then you've probably hit built-in bluetooth (chip? firmware?) bug I was hitting.

I used my pi3 paired with a bluetooth headset (Xiaomi mi bluetooth sports) using a2dp profile.
For me after a random time from 10 seconds to 40 minutes it just stalled, no more audio, no way to do anything with bluetooth, after the stall even running `hciconfig -a` resulted in error.
However I never had a single problem while transferring large files from my phone over obex.
So my guess is that the bug is related to a2dp.

I can't remember of my head the exact error messages in dmesg, edit: those message start to appear some time after the stall, I think due to bluetooth ACL frame max timeout set to ~45s in kernel.
I've tried everything - old and new bluetooth firmwares, different kernel versions, different kernel config options, bluez built from git, pulseaudio, bluealsa (bluez-alsa), dozens of different configs tweaks, disabling wifi via dtoverlay - nothing helps, plays for a random time, stalls, reboot ... .

I did not report the issue to kernel/firmware github as I'm using my own OS with custom kernel (sources from rpf github) and I don't have the time to do some proper testing using latest raspbian, something I think the devs would rightfully ask for.

Solution: buy a USB bluetooth dongle, BT 4.0 should suffice.
I've got myself a cheap one with CSR chipset - and all my problems are now gone, plays fine for hours.

[Januil]

Hi Guys,

Thanx for the replies. I also tried everything already. and yes the speaker is oké because its running on a windows computers real fine.

I think I will follow your suggestions and buy myself a BT dongle.
Strange, you buy a rpi with BT on board and still have to buy a dongle

Jan

[Januil]

Hi guys,

bought myself a BT-dongle.
Is there somewhere a good how-to for installing it and disabaling internal BT?
Any help for this nood is highly appreciated.

Jan

[Douglas6]

To disable the on-board Bluetooth, add this line to /boot/config.txt:

Code: Select all

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

And here's a handy pictorial guide for installing the Bluetooth dongle:
https://lifehacker.com/5847279/how-to-p ... every-time

[mlepage]

When you figure it out, be sure to let us know what the problem was, and how you solved it. Good luck.