Announce Your Entry with Raspberry Pi, Python and Bluetooth

Did you ever want to have your return to your office or home announced with a fanfare?

Probably not, but let’s do this anyway ;)

This script will use Bluetooth (built into the Raspberry Pi 3) to detect when your phone is nearby, and if detected will play the MP3 of your choice!

See it in action:

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A post shared by Chris Garrett (@chrisgarrett)

Setting up

You will need some prerequisites:

• Bluetooth developer libraries
  sudo apt-get install libbluetooth-dev

• Bluez Bluetooth tools
  sudo apt-get install bluez

• Python library
  sudo python3 -m pip install pybluez

• If you want to convert your audio to mp3
  sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

• Nice tool for grabbing YouTube and converting to MP3
  sudo python3 -m pip install youtube-dl

Eg.
youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bzWSJG93P8

• Media player for the Pi command line
  sudo apt-get install mplayer

Code

In this simple code we will keep looping and looking for a specific device name, in my case “Chrisg”. When it is found we launch Mplayer with the specific audio.

import os
import bluetooth

while 1:

    print("Searching ...")

    devices = bluetooth.discover_devices(duration=10, lookup_names=1, flush_cache=1)

    for device_address, device_name in devices:

        print("Found: {}".format(device_name))

        if(device_name.lower() == "chrisg"):
            os.system("mplayer /home/pi/imperial.mp3")