recommendation for setting up a rpi node with touchscreen control?

[TomDakan]

Hi,

I have a raspberry pi 4b with the 7" touchscreen that has been running picoreplayer with jivelite. I've never been happy with the bluetooth sink functionality in picoreplayer so I've been looking at alternative solutions and came across odio.

It sounds like displaying odio remote in a kiosk-mode browser might be the way to go, but I haven't taken the plunge to try installing it yet and I can't seem to find anything here or on the odio.love site that mentions touchscreens.

The inputs I want to support would be bluetooth, and some sort local music server like LMS, MPD, or navidrome for managing playback and displaying my local music library.

In terms of outputs, I'll have the one node with a touchscreen interface, as well as at least two nodes that are headless, and probably more in the future. I need to support synced multi-room playback from any input (via snapcast I guess?) and I need it to be simple for other people in the house to use if they just want to play music on one node either by using the touchscreen, or from the pwa.

Does this sound like a system I can achieve with odio + a snapserver + mpd or similar + ? or am I misunderstanding what odio is intended to accomplish?

Thanks!

[b0bbywan]

Hey thanks for this message !

Regarding external display, I found a user post mentionning framebuffer browser , a modern browser that does't need Xorg or Wayland and should be able to display the odio remote/ui.

There's no pre-built binaries so you'll have to install the dependencies and compile it on your pi b+, and create a new systemd user unit to start it on boot. That's something I might be able to serve from apt.odio.love some day.

For multi-room, there is docs about setting up a snapserver on a NAS, but that can be done on a single odio node too. It explains how to set up MPD as a snapserver source.

The odio remote UI carries link to a local mympd, to manage your local library, and a link to snapserver to choose the source for each snapclient.

For bluetooth multi-room, it's partially achievable, you have to create a new sink for pulseaudio , and load that pipe in snapserver like you do on MPD. However, on the master node carrying snapserver, you won't be able to send it to snapcast and playback from the local snapclient, there'll be a double clock conflict with your bluetooth source, the other nodes should work fine though.

On a wired network, you can also use the pulse-tcp feature to send the audio directly to another odio-node as described here. This feature isn't reliable enough in wifi, so it's automatically disabled on wireless networks.

There's also some docs about LMS and navidrome

Let me know if you any need help !

[TomDakan]

Thank you! That's some very useful information to get me going.

Am I understanding correctly that multi-room bluetooth would work fine if the snapserver process is running on a machine (e.g. a vm on my server) that is neither a bluetooth input or an audio output?

Just to be clear, my goal would just be to send an audio signal from a single bluetooth source (a guest's phone) to one or more output devices.

[b0bbywan]

Nice! The machine running snapserver should have bluetooth, pulseaudio with the pipe for snapserver as the only audio output, but no snapclient.

[TomDakan]

Ok, so Odio can't help with routing bluetooth into a node, sending it to the snapcast server, and then routing it back out one or more snapcast clients?

[b0bbywan]

You can send bluetooth to as many snapclient that you want, as long as it's not the same machine that handles the bluetooth connection.

It's specific to bluetooth, mpd for example doesn't have this issue. You can actually try it, it works at the very beginning, then system load exploses trying to sync bluetooth and snapcast clocks and drops most audio frames.