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       Bluetooth is easy
       February 24th, 2018
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       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.