so, I want to use Volumio in my car audio system, however I need the pi to connect to my phone as a hotspot for the internet… I can get it to do this… however… I then can’t see the pi in the Volumio app even though it definitely is connected to the phones WiFi hotspot
If I use a small WiFi router connected to both devices with a sim in I can then see the pi in the app and all is good, but that means extra cost and an extra SIM card I don’t wish to buy
I just want to use a single unlimited data sim in the car for everything
Don’t have a solution for you, but I know the reason.
When you use a router, the phone and the Pi are on the same unrestricted LAN.
When using phone as a hotspot, phone and Pi run on separated LAN’s, they can’t see each other.
Possible solution: something like this, a 4G/LTE router, where you put the SIMcard. Then you have full feature WiFi in the car. It can be powered straight from the cars 12V. You can hide it under dashboard, you will never need to access it…
Unfortunately I can’t use the phone on a WiFi network because I use it on wireless CarPlay and that ties up the WiFi connection from the phone… I just wondered if there was some setting I could adjust to get it to see it on the same network
I will experiment with a usb hub with a lan connection and not WiFi to see if that is then visible in the app but I suspect not…
The phone is a definite source of digital audio that is not going anywhere… I like the convenience of CarPlay wirelessly and then tapping digital audio out of the phone via the usb c port as I use Apple Music (AirPlay2 isn’t an option as not bit perfect)
I tried this and it worked. On your hotspot iPhone, instead of using the Volumio app, open the browser and navigate to http://volumio.local (the default; otherwise replace “volumio” with your custom name).
I can give reason for android thought, I do not believe it’s any different for apple products.
So what happens within the app, is that it checks if it’s connected to wifi network and then either scans the network for devices or not.
No wifi → no scan
Wifi → scan
If the network was scanned either way, it would find the device without an issue from the hotpot created by the device you try to control your volumio product with.
This was actually the main reason i started developing my volumio client Android app in first place, I had the very same situation car, hotspot and volumio on pi, and yes I was able to discover the volumio device 100% of time from the hotspot within the app so it’s very much possible.
This is not only volumios problem, many mainstream apps actually do the network discovery with same logic and fail miserably in the same scenario.
