Hi all,
I was considering setting up a few Bluetooth Lightbulbs that have a built in speakers for notifications - since these bulbs will be scattered throughout the house, any ideas how I can “boost” the bluetooth signal to them?
I was thinking perhaps pairing them to a local device - i.e. Raspberry Pi w/ MPD, then over the network from HA trigger audio playback via MPD?
It’s too bad the new Bluetooth Proxy feature in HA doesn’t support audio?
Any other options?
I do not think there is any ‘boosting’ of old school Bluetooth signals possible for audio streams, other than turning the Volume Knob up to 11 
There is a new thing called BLE Bluetooth Mesh, which does ‘relay’, ‘repeat’ or ‘route’… pick the poor English word for the technology to remote devices. That said, your Bluetooth (I am pretty sure it only supports Bluetooth Low Energy devices and not ‘regular’ Bluetooth) device must support this ‘BLE mesh’ technology. You will have to see it referenced in the device specs, if not most likely not there. This is pretty new tech. And even within this really new tech, I have not heard of the ability to extend audio streams.
To stream any audio that needs to ‘extend’ it’s reach via an intermediate device, you will probably end up in a WiFi solution today.
Good hunting.
I saw that Home Assistant’s BLE Bluetooth implementation seems to work fine with USB/IP. I wonder if USB/IP will also work to extend Bluetooth to remote locations for audio?
I might try USB/IP first since I can run it on a Synology which is pretty close to where I was planning on installing the USB speaker.