Smart Bluetooth Speaker Built From Scratch with an Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Everyone likes to listen to music, and you have a nearly endless list of options on how you can go about it. You can just listen to the radio or CDs in your car, play old vinyl on a turntable at home, or plug some headphones into your smartphone. A Bluetooth speaker is, of course, another option that is affordable and practical. But most Bluetooth speakers are “dumb” and can’t do anything other than connect to your device. TiboSevenhant decided to build a smart Bluetooth speaker from scratch, and has a tutorial explaining exactly how he did it.

There are a few capabilities that separate TiboSevenhant’s Slimbox from a regular ol’ Bluetooth speaker. The most important is that it has a Raspberry Pi inside, so it can stream music or play local music without needing to connect to a smartphone. It is also packed full of sensors, so it can collect data about the world and then display the information it gathers. For instance, there is a small LCD on the front of the Slimbox that displays information from a DS18B20 temperature sensor.

The major components of this build are: a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, an Arduino Uno, an 16x2 character LCD display, an Adafruit NeoPixel Ring, a DS18B20 temperature sensor, an LSM303 accelerometer, a MAX98357 class-D mono amplifier, and a 3" speaker. The Raspberry Pi is doing most of the work here, and the Arduino is only used as an intermediary between that and the NeoPixel ring. TiboSevenhant enclosed that all inside of a wood wine box, but you could always 3D-print a case that suits your tastes.