Headless Bluetooth PulseAudio Sink

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TX2
#1

Hello,

We are trying to get a bluetooth speaker working with the TX2 running headless. I’ve done the “Bluetooth Device Settings” section in the L4T docs and we can pair/connect to the speaker without issue. However PulseAudio doesn’t create a bluetooth sound card unless we log into Unity on a monitor and I can’t seem to find it anywhere.

Is it possible to use bluetooth without starting up Unity? Almost everything I’ve found online seems to assume you can use the GUI.

#2

Hi, Atrer

Before login to the UI session, could you check if the pulseaudio thread is runing?

nvidia@N:~$ ps -aux | grep pulseaudio
nvidia    6910  0.1  0.0 1023236 13028 ?       Sl   10:18   0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog

If not Pls have a try:

systemctl --user enable pulseaudio && systemctl --user start pulseaudio
#3

Yes

$ ps -aux | grep pulseaudio
lightdm   2092  0.3  0.1 373252 10340 ?        Sl   10:14   0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog

pactl list works also, I can see two cards

  1. tegra-hda
  2. tegra-snd-t186ref-mobile-rt565x

and I can see the bluetooth modules

$ pactl list modules | grep bluetooth
Name: module-bluetooth-policy
	module.description = "Policy module to make using bluetooth devices out-of-the-box easier"
Name: module-bluetooth-discover
#4

Got it working by using Xvfb to start a headless X11 server:

sudo Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 </dev/null &
export DISPLAY=":1"

Then pactl finds the bluetooth sink:

$ pactl list short sinks
0       alsa_output.platform-3510000.hda.hdmi-stereo-extra1     module-alsa-card.c      s16le 2ch 44100Hz       SUSPENDED
1       alsa_output.platform-sound.analog-stereo        module-alsa-card.c      s16le 2ch 44100Hz       SUSPENDED
2       bluez_sink.C0_28_8D_65_2D_A4    module-bluez5-device.c  s16le 2ch 44100Hz       IDLE
#5