Balena Sound disable discoverability

Product support
1

Hi there,

I am running 4 Pi’s with balenaSound in multiroom configuration. 1 Pi3 and 3 Pi2B’s. So far this works good, but I noticed that I best use the Pi3 as master for the multiroom (I suspect the hardware specs help :wink: ), Now I am wondering, is it possible to make the Bluetooth, spotify and airplay services “hidden” without removing them entirely, to prevent confusion in which device to stream to?

Kind regards,
C

4

Hey there! Thanks for sharing your use case and the feature request. I’d be interesting to extend balenaSound with a CLIENT_ONLY environment variable that, when set, disables non-required services and prevents bluetooth from going into discoverable mode.

Are you up for contributing this to the project yourself? Every contain is defined as a directory here: https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound, and each container has a start.sh script (i.e. https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound/blob/master/bluetooth-audio/start.sh). You can check for the existence of such variable at runtime, and early-terminate the unnecessary services if so.

What do you think?

6

I can certainly give it a shot!

I’ll look into it and post back when I have results or questions!

8

Hi @jviotti, Okay. Since I’m not entirely sure of myself in what I am doing xD

Wouldn’t it work to replace the service startup line of the start.sh script with:

i f [[ ! $CLIENT_ONLY == “1” ]]; then
==insert startup line here==
fi

in the services that are not required for a client only function? (If I am not mistaken, the fleet_supervisor and snapcast_client services are needed, the rest can be disabled?)

So, in the spotify_client it would be:

if [[ ! $CLIENT_ONLY == "1" ]]; then
  printf "Device is discoverable as \"%s\"\n" "$BLUETOOTH_DEVICE_NAME"
  exec /usr/bin/bluealsa-aplay --pcm-buffer-time=1000000 00:00:00:00:00:00
fi

Would this create the CLIENT_ONLY variable and disable the services not needed from starting?

10

Hello, balenaSound maintainer here. You are on the right track, though i’d like to make some minor observations.

A client only device would indeed only need fleet-supervisor and snapcast-client services. Your approach is correct though I would frame it the other way around: if CLIENT_ONLY is defined then exit the script/container. You can see an implementation of this behaviour here: https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound/blob/master/snapcast-server/start.sh

Also, it’s a good idea to exit “early”, specially for bluetooth-audio container because it spins multiple processes. So in that case I’d move the “exit” logic to the top of the script.

Lastly, we need to consider that multi-room can be disabled. We don’t want to end up in a situation where multi-room is disabled and device is in client only mode, so basically all of our services will be dead :slight_smile: So there needs to be a check or warning in place.

11

Thank you for the info! That also answers another question I had too xD

12

No problem! Feel free to open a PR on the repo even if it’s a work in progress. It’s a lot easier for us to provide feedback in GitHub than through the forums. Also, thanks for giving this a shot!

14

Of course! Teaches me a few things at the same time :wink:

I’ll see if I can get GitHub to work with me xD I am new in how that works, but I’ll figure it out :slight_smile:

15

It can be tricky for sure! Before submitting check our contribution guidelines here: https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

TLDR: Be sure to include Change-type: minor on your commit message!

17

I opened a PR with the initial changes. I hope I did it right :laughing:

18

Thanks for contributing to the project!

20

Update: Changes have been made, and they have been merged :smiley:

21

Thanks very much for your contribution!