Mikhail Nevskiy
@trudenboy

I maintain sendspin-bt-bridge, a free open-source tool that lets self-hosted music systems play audio to any regular Bluetooth speaker. It fills a gap left by Spotify Connect, AirPlay, and Chromecast: making the inexpensive Bluetooth speakers people already own work as part of a real multi-room setup.

The bridge plugs into Music Assistant — an open-source media server commonly used with Home Assistant — and turns ordinary Bluetooth speakers into proper multi-room players, with correct synchronization, volume control, transport keys, battery readout, and now-playing metadata. It runs as a Home Assistant add-on, a Docker container, or a Linux service. Source code, documentation, and full release history live at github.com/trudenboy/sendspin-bt-bridge.

Why I'm asking for donations

The project is MIT-licensed today and will stay that way regardless of how donations go — there's no premium tier, no paywalled features, no donor-only Discord. What your support actually pays for:

• Test hardware. Every speaker model — IKEA, Sony, JBL, Yandex, no-name brands — has its own BlueZ quirks that can only be debugged on the real device.
• Infrastructure — domain, documentation hosting, CI runners.

• Time to chase regressions in BlueZ and the wider Bluetooth stack, which is where most of the unglamorous maintenance work lives.

  If this bridge has saved you from giving up on a Bluetooth speaker or from replacing perfectly good hardware just to fit into a "smart" ecosystem, a small recurring contribution is the most direct way to keep that work going.

  Not donating is a perfectly fine answer too. A clear bug report, a pull request, or recommending the project to someone who'd benefit is just as valuable.