[pulseaudio-discuss] Bluetooth + HSP + Raspberry?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 10:28 +0200, Bram de Jong wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> [first post on this list, hi!]
> 
> After a bit of a struggle I found a bluetooth dongle which allows me
> to use PA for stable A2DP streaming from my phone to a raspberry pi...
> Awesome!
> 
> My next quest would be to use PA for HSP streaming (one way only, but
> I need the low latency!).
> 
> However, I saw some information about the release of PA3 ("PulseAudio
> can be used in a Bluetooth headset role, for example to connect a
> laptop to a mobile phone and pretend that the laptop is a headset.")
> which makes me fear that this will not be possible with PA2. This
> use-case perfectly describes what I want to do: I want to use a
> raspberry pi as a headset for a phone.

The text that you quoted refers to the functionality provided by
module-bluetooth-policy. That module loads module-loopback automatically
when a bluetooth source (a2dp or hfgw) appears. I think PA2 supports the
hfgw profile, it just doesn't load module-loopback automatically. You
didn't say what you want to do with the audio from the phone, so I don't
know if you even need module-loopback, but if you do, you can load it
manually just fine.

If you have already successfully streamed audio from your phone to the
pi using a2dp, then you have already used the pi as a fake headset. The
only difference with HSP is that instead of the a2dp_source profile, you
need to set the bluetooth card in pulseaudio to use the hfgw profile.

> Should I be looking into trying to upgrade my PA and BlueZ versions to
> the latest versions?

That shouldn't be necessary. And if you do upgrade, you definitely
shouldn't upgrade bluez to any of the 5.x versions, because pulseaudio
doesn't yet work with them.

-- 
Tanu