Bluetooth Range Extender for Audio
Date
2014
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Engineering
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
One of the common uses of Bluetooth is to allow for the playback of audio from a phone or other music device out to Bluetooth speakers. However, for most Bluetooth devices, the range of this connection is limited to about 10m. If one would like to make this Bluetooth connection indoors, as is usually the case, then the presence of walls in between the Bluetooth devices further limits the range of the connection. Using a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, along with some Linux packages that facilitate the connection of Bluetooth devices to the microcontroller, the range of this Bluetooth audio connection can be extended. The result of this idea is a C script run on the microcontroller that allows both the Bluetooth source device and the Bluetooth output device to connect to the Raspberry Pi and play audio. Essentially, the Raspberry Pi relays the Bluetooth audio signal from the phone to the Bluetooth speakers. Several key APIs were involved in the process: the PulseAudio Simple API allowed for access and manipulation of the audio stream, the BlueZ package was the standard Bluetooth protocol for the Linux operating system and enabled the user to open up connections to the Bluetooth devices from the microcontroller, and the Blueman API provided a simple graphical user interface to pair the Bluetooth devices to the RPi using function calls from the BlueZ package. The maximum range for the connection between the phone and the Bluetooth speakers without the addition of the Raspberry Pi is 11.2 meters. The maximum range with the Raspberry Pi facilitating the connection is 19.7 meters.