bluetooth-keepalive

Small script to prevent bluetooth audio devices from shutting down when idle, my speaker's timeout is below 5 minutes (looking at you, Teufel, sry) and I always have to get up and switch it back on. Should work on debian and derivatives, haven't tested it on anything else.

Basic Usage

1. Check out the repo, make the script executable.
2. Figure out the MAC address of the device you're aiming for via bluetoothctl devices
3. On the command line run it like

./bt-keepalive.sh 00:11:22:33:44:55

A log file is generated where the script resides. You can optionally specify a path to log the output to somewhere else (or comment the bits out).

Run automatically

Running it once does not make a lot of sense, the easiest way is to create a cronjob for your user via crontab -e, e.g.

*/5 * * * * XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="/run/user/$(id -u)" /path/to/script/bt-keepalive.sh 00:11:22:33:44:55

The env-var is needed for the cronjob to have enough info on the pulse-audio environment, otherwise pactl list short sinks might fail.