Networking and Communications

In which I attempt to use Bluetooth.

Our assignents this week:

• Design, build, and connect wireless or wired nodes with network or bus addresses.
• Send a message between two projects.

I definitely am approaching this week with a non-trivial amount of anxiety, given that Bluetooth will likely be very important in my final project, and that I have yet to get an LED blinking. Hopefully, this will be the week that I get a self-designed board working!

Designing the board

Eagle!

I returned to Eagle after taking a break from it for a few weeks, and designed a board to use the RN4871 bluetooth module, since bluetooth would be part of my final project. The footprint and the schematic of the board I designed:

Does it work?

ASCII commands, excitement

After stuffing the board, to my surprise, I realized that I didn't even have to program this board. I just connected it to the computer via FTDI and typed in commands to get it to blink and to assign it a name. These commands can be found in the user manual, and I used Neil's video to figure out what to do. The board I designed has two LEDs, one to indicate power and another for the status of the connection- fast blinking indicates connection and slow blinking indicates lack thereof.
A connected module blinks like this:
I then connected the module to my phone (I installed LightBlue, a BLE developer app) and sent a "hello".