---------------------------------------- Bluetooth is easy February 24th, 2018 ---------------------------------------- I ran across a little demo project the other day showing how a $7 component could connect an Arduino to any bluetooth device. It was a bit of a revelation for me. I had assumed that there was a lot going on in Bluetooth land, and that it wasn't worth the effort diving into all the protocol nonsense. It turns out it's a glorified serial port. Enter the HC-05 and it's brother the HC-06. These little 4-pin components handle all the parts of Bluetooth you don't care about. Here's what you get: 5V input, Ground, Tx, Rx. Sound familiar? I plopped a Lucky Shield onto my Arduino so I had some sensors going, ran the example Lucky Shield Test, which outputs a bunch of data from those sensors to the Serial debug panel, and plugged in a HC-06. I paired the HC-06 with my phone by entering the default 1234 code. Then I opened up a serial debugger on my phone. I was pleasently greeted by a bunch of information about the light, humidity, air pressure, and so on. No fuss, no muss. I love it when things just work. The HC-05 and HC-06 are very similar in features and price. The HC-05 can do more, act as a master bluetooth device instead of a slave, and send some funky control stuff that I don't care about. I got the HC-06 because I found one on Amazon Prime and I was impatient. I saw these in bulk on Alibaba for under $2. I'm going to rig up a little voltage divider circuit with a handful of push buttons, flash it onto an ATTiny85, and try to design and print a PCB for the unit. It'll connect with the HC-06, and eventually I'll 3D print a case for it. I want a little component based, battery powered, bluetooth button controller that I can use for random acts of silliness. In other, less fun, news, my latest raspberry pi zero w is refusing to play nice with the wifi. I set it up identically to the last one which worked flawlessly, but nada. I'm going to bring it in to work and swap the SD card I have in the working one to check if the problem is hardware related or software caused. Moops.