Add Bluetooth Speaker to HA

The Bluetooth integration in HA has very limited support to auto detect or scan for Bluetooth speaker. For this, we have to first pair the Bluetooth speaker to the VM running HA.

Hardware

Speaker: Anker Soundcore Motion+

Bluetooth Adapter: ASUS TUF motherboard built-in Bluetooth module

Prerequisite

First make sure you pass Bluetooth adapter to the HA VM.

Then start the VM.

Pair Bluetooth Speaker on VM

First we have to login to HA OS as privilege user (root) in order to gain access to execute some privilege command and accessing folder in the terminal. To gain access to the terminal, make sure to use the VLC method or SSH to the VM, and NOT using the Terminal add on in HA. Using Terminal in HA won’t give you any access to modify a very important file in the HA Supervisor folder to set the default output to Bluetooth speaker.

After you login to the VM, type login to gain access to the privilege shell as root user.

We will then use the bluetoothctl command to interact with the Bluetooth adapter hardware.

Replace 7C:96:D2:60:BC:4A with the MAC address of your bluetooth speaker that you see during Scanning.

login
bluetoothctl power on
bluetoothctl agent on
bluetoothctl default-agent
bluetoothctl scan on
bluetoothctl pair 7C:96:D2:60:BC:4A
bluetoothctl connect 7C:96:D2:60:BC:4A
bluetoothctl trust 7C:96:D2:60:BC:4A
exit

💡 If the connection is successful, the blinking Bluetooth LED indicator in your Bluetooth speaker should remain static. This should apply to most Bluetooth speaker, such as the Anker Soundcore Motion+ that I am using.

Example screenshot of different bluetoothctl command.

exi

Following is the result when you activate the scan command.

After pairing, we will then use a higher level command to reload the audio driver so HA can detect. If you see Dummy interface, that means it haven’t detect your Bluetooth speaker yet. In that case, repeat audio reload command several times until you see the loaded bluez driver and alsa.

💡 If you see the following `Dummy Output`, that means the VM is not connecting to your Bluetooth speaker. In this case, run `audio reload` again to see if it picked it up.

[NOT NEEDED] Set Default Output Device to the Bluetooth Speaker

💡 I later found out that this step is NOT necessary and wouldn’t have any impact to the way the OS . It is only important that `audio info` shows your Bluetooth speaker info. I kept here for historical purpose only!

Once we paired and connect the Bluetooth speaker to the VM, we will then set it as the default output.

Go to /mnt/data/supervisor/audio folder and make a copy of the asound file, which contains the configuration that tell the OS which sound output device to use as the default output device.

cp asound asound.bak

Replace the content of asound with the following. Replace device 7C:96:D2:60:BC:4A with the MAC address of your Bluetooth speaker.

TOBE ADDED

Screenshot showing the content of asound file.

Install VLC Player Add-On

@ref: https://github.com/home-assistant/addons/blob/master/vlc/DOCS.md

First, install VLC Player add-on within HA so we can later playback any media to it.

Navigate in your Home Assistant frontend to Settings -> Add-ons -> Add-on store.

Find the "VLC" add-on and click it.

Click on the "INSTALL" button.

You should see the following after installation. Toggle on Show in sidebar so we can access its UI there.

Set Default Output in VLC Player Add-On

WARNING

It is very IMPORTANT to access the Configuration tab here and set the default output device to the Bluetooth speaker that we just connected. Without doing this there won’t be any audio playback to the VLC player when we play any music later.

💡 It took me nearly one hour to figure out why there is no music coming out from my Bluetooth speaker even though the Bluetooth LED on my speaker is lid statically, and I can see successful connection on HA. I learnt this lesson so you don’t have to!

The VLC UI after clicking the sidebar icon. There isn’t any use here and we shouldn’t be using it anytime soon. Remember the goal is to playback any music files that we have in Music Assistant.

Next, we will install VLC Player telnet integration so that we will have a media_player entity that connects to the VLC Player that we just installed in HA!

Install VLC Player TelNet Integration

Go to Settings > Devices & Services, and you should see the newly detected VLC player that we just installed locally. We need to add this Integration to HA so that this VLC player will appear as a media_player entity or type that we can later call using HA service call, especially when using Music Assistant.

Press the Configure button on the newly discovered core-vlc integration. This is the VLC Player Add-On that we just installed.

Click Submit.

💡 DO NOT MANUALLY add the VideoLAN add on and select `VLC media player via Telnet`, if you use the steps shown in the following three screenshots, that means you are doing it wrong! **Use the automatically detected VLC Player that appeared in `Discovered` section.**

Set the

Add VLCTelnet media player to MusicAssistant

Go to Music Assistant settings, then select Home Assistant Media Players provider, and add it.

Select the newly detected player.

Profit! Enjoy the music playing to your Bluetooth speaker!