Give your old audio amplifiers a new lease of life with this RM11.90 bluetooth audio receiver

Chinese no-name Bluetooth Audio Receiver

Over the years we kept upgrading the living room audio systems: first turntable gave way to the cassette tape deck, which then changed to the CD player, then mp3 player. This resulted in a few orphaned amplifiers and speakers, especially if they have odd impedances like 4 or 6 Ohms.

These days we play most of our music from smartphones; why not convert them to bluetooth speakers? I used this RM11.90 sgrobot bluetooth audio receiver.

Note the LED, resistor and capacitor

It came with some loose parts: an LED, 100 Ohm resistor and an electrolytic capacitor. Somehow it reminded me of excess bluetooth audio receiver modules off a PCB mainboard for a bluetooth speaker or somesuch now sold off cheaply. The IC markings C7THN5004 did not come up on an Internet search; they look like custom markings. Never mind, better this than discarding it in the municipal landfill.

gameinstance.com has a good write-up on it:

I soldered the parts on it; it literally took one minute.

The pinouts are printed on the PCB, but here they are anyway:

3rd pin from top: left speaker, 4th pin: right speaker

I powered it from my trusty D-link USB3 hub, which puts out a whopping 2A at 5V.

To test, I connected it to yet another one of my orphaned PC analog speakers with integrated audio amplifier. I used my Raspberry Pi Zero W with a brand-new version of Raspbian (Debian 'stretch') and omxplayer. It worked without fuss.  It came up as WIN-668 and paired without asking for a PIN.

I had less luck with my Raspberry Pi B+. It had built-in analog and HDMI audio and omxplayer just would not work out of the box. I'm sure that is fixable, but that is another blog post.

As usual, if you can't be bothered with this DIY malarkey, you can buy it ready-made for RM16.90:

RM29: Bluetooth audio receiver. The USB connector is for power only

Once the speakers are bluetooth-enabled, especially combined with the Raspberry Pi Zero W, it becomes and Internet of Things (IoT) device. Now applications like your very own DIY Google Home becomes possible.

Not bad for something one step from the rubbish heap. Happy Trails.