Using on-board WiFi/BT chip for Bluetooth multi-room

Project help balenaSound
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Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on a project based on a Raspberry Pi CM4 board with a custom Yocto image, with MPD, Bluetooth and Spotify connect for playing audio. A dev I work with started to implement SnapCast to add multi-room feature to the project, apparently it works well with Spotify, but he had a lot of audio dropouts when using Bluetooth as the source.
I’m aware of the issues that a lot of people raised about the coexistence of WiFi and Bluetooth on Raspberry Pi using on-board wireless chip, but I wanted to know if anyone was successfull using it for Bluetooth multi-room, as we can’t currently add a Bluetooth dongle to our boards.

I just started to test balenaSound, I’m able to see the I2S signals coming out but now I need to add a Python script to initialize the amplifier as it needs.

If unfortunately both Bluetooth and WiFi can’t work together for audio purposes, we would have to redesign our system, maybe adding an external BT/WiFi chip, or even move from the CM4.

Any feedback on this subject will be very appreciated.

Yoann

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Hi,

Can you please be a bit more specific? Are you getting an error using balenaSound? Or does the audio drop out when you have both BT and WiFi enabled? In either case, it’s best to share some logs or some diagnostic information to help narrow down a root cause.

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Hi @builder555,

No it wasn’t occuring with Balena, but on our Yocto image. But since then we found a solution that improved the behavior of Bluetooth audio when using WiFi too. It’s still not perfect, but way better than it was. We still see a difference of wiresless quality between our image and the last Raspbian, so still have some room for improvement, but I think we’ll find our way (probably drivers are older on Yocto releases than Raspbian).

Anyway, my question was more generic about the Pi (was he able to handle Buletooth multiroom), and I’ve got my answer now :slight_smile:

Thanks for your time.