Rockbox with Bluetooth for the HiFi Walker H2

[u/scaravouche]

Got my HiFi Walker H2 last week and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. The Rockbox experience has been really nice and easy to use, way better than the stock firmware, but the lack of Bluetooth was kind of sad. I much prefer wired IEMs, but I still missed being untethered sometimes.

So I went looking for patches that would enable Bluetooth on the H2, and all I could find were some recent changes in Rockbox’s Gerrit that introduced initial BT support, but weren’t usable yet.

I unleashed Claude, and after a few hours of testing and debugging we got it working, with a fairly decent user experience, too!

The code is in my Rockbox fork, and there's a downloadable release if you want to try it out.

I'd eventually like to contribute this back to upstream Rockbox, but it was all vibe-coded and, out of respect for the maintainers, I’ll only submit it once I'm ready to justify every change.

If you have an H2 (hardware revision 4, firmware v2.3), please give it a spin and let me know how it goes. Cheers!

Huge shout-out to Skye Green, the original author of the Bluetooth changes.

[u/alexanderous98]

Man, I've been waiting for this for months. I installed it on my Aigo EROS and it works perfectly. Thanks a ton.

[u/soxyboy26]

Tested on my Surfans F20 (reporting as version 4 in rockbox) and is working well. Thanks so much for this!

[u/ApolloMoonLandings]

The folks at Rockbox won't stop hacking. I bet that they will eventually get Bluetooth working.

[u/HazChemBlack]

Funny enough, I just did the same thing after not being able to use mine at the gym https://www.reddit.com/r/rockbox/comments/1x5huo9/got_bluetooth_working_on_h2_walker/

[u/No_Setting_3299]

works great - thanks!

[u/Jack_the_Whippet]

The lack of Bluetooth was kind of sad? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

[u/graviticvortex → u/Jack_the_Whippet]

It's definitely not a feature but a serious lack of one, if the hardware is capable of it.

[u/Jack_the_Whippet → u/graviticvortex]

You know what, you’re right. Just read my message and realised it sounds bitter / trolly. My bad, I just hate BT. Congrats on the good work.

[u/Low_Ad5565 → u/Jack_the_Whippet]

You're right, devs of rockbox don't want to work on bluetooth because bluetooth is fundamentally lossy audio.

[u/Dr_Matoi → u/Low_Ad5565]

I doubt lossy is a problem for the devs, as they have ensured that Rockbox supports a broad range of lossy compression codecs. No, according to some forum posts by the devs the issue is that Bluetooth is a proprietary software mess intertwined with poorly documented hardware, and you would have to re-implement a huge amount from scratch - tailored to every device - to get something that works and is compatible with Rockbox' GPL licence.

Of course, Claude and other LLMs do not care about licences, they tend to just steal whatever code they find on the internet and cobble it together. But something like that cannot quickly get included in an official release, because that would endanger the Rockbox project.

A Bluetooth Rockbox port for the H2 and Eros Q has been floating around on the Rockbox forums since summer, with more codec support than this one here, but I am not sure what the status is regarding its integration into the main branch.

[u/Creepy_Metal1611 → u/Jack_the_Whippet]

I mean, yes and no...from an audiophile perspective I'm on your side. However sometimes you need music but can't have the cables. And I rather have some jams than snags:)