Adding Amazon Echo or any other bluez (Bluetooth) sink with pipewire-pulse to Openhab

Before I go any deeper into this: has anyone actually managed to use Amazon Echo Dot OR any other bluetooth smart speaker as a Bluetooth audio sink in Openhab that is run with Raspberry Pi?

I’ve now tried the best I can to get it working:

  • I’ve installed Pulseaudio bindings.
  • Set up pipewire-pulse server, which is configured to run on port 4711. I can see this with “pactl -s tcp:127.0.0.1:4711 list sinks”.
  • Set up the thing server in Openhab and it says ONLINE
  • Set up audio sink thing in Openhab but it says OFFLINE
  • The Openhab audio sink name is the exact name of the “bluez_sink…”
  • Set user and tcp permissions

Pulseaudio Sink binding however remains OFFLINE and karaf console only shows the two default audio sinks.

Openhab logs don’t show anything meaningful.

any ideas?