Bluetooth Speaker - fo-am/sonic-kayaks GitHub Wiki

Tools required

Linux laptop or something you can run SSH on to run commands and edit files on the Raspberry Pi.

Ingredients

Ultimate Ears Megaboom 3 bluetooth speaker [£140]

Instructions

A waterproof Bluetooth speaker is used with the sonic kayaks system. This means that fewer cables need to be used - ultimately reducing the risk of tangling and water ingress. To enable sounds to be transmitted over a Bluetooth connection, the speaker needs to be paired with and connected to the Raspberry Pi. A few bits of software configurations are also required:

Ensure that speaker firmware is up to date. For the Wonderboom speaker currently used, this involved connecting the speaker to a phone running the Ultimate Ears App.
Whilst in the terminal on the Raspberry Pi (either directly or remotely with SSH), run bluetoothctl to initialise the Bluetooth control program.
Use scan on to see available devices.
Enter Bluetooth speaker into pairing mode (For the Wonderboom speaker this is done by holding down the small dot button on top of the device).
Remain in scanning mode and once the desired device and it's address appear use pair to pair devices. E.g. pair E0:JF:93:3D:45. Note that tabbed autocomplete can be used to print the full address in the console.
Then use connect E0:JF:93:3D:45.
Leave the bluetoothctl program with exit.
Now navigate to the home directory of the sonic kayaks system and open .asoundrc for editing (e.g. with nano .asoundrc).
Ensure that the address of the bluetooth speaker (as seen in bluetoothctl) is stated on line 5.
Now navigate to app-kayak/audio_restarter/start_jack.sh and open for editing.
Repeat step 9.