USB Bluetooth to Serial

I wrote about a crap Bluetooth dongle that I bought last year. I was terked about the big honkin' plastic case with a fake antenna. While looking at the pcb, I noticed that it was a Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) chip labeled BC212 015BD A21AA. At the time, I did a quick Google search on the part number and moved on after not seeing anything too interesting.

Tonight I read a post on the Arduino Forum about cheap Bluetooth that said most USB Bluetooth dongles were "just a USB Serial Com device for the Bluetooth software stack to talk to". What?!? No frickin' way. A USB dongle is a USB Slave device that requires a USB Master device to interfaces with it. Isn't that so?

Mr Dougl's (junior member) post started me thinking about that Bluetooth crap thing. There's no way that it's just a serial port device. I went back to that quick Google search and began reviewing the hits. This one seems interesting. A Bluetooth RS232 to Bluetooth Adapter. And it uses the same CSR BT chip as my crap. Hmmm. Could my chip have a simple serial interface? And if it does, can I interface this crap to the simple serial rx/tx interface of an Arduino?

A little more digging uncovered the CSR BlueCore DataBook that says the BC212 has both a USB and UART interface.

First thing I noticed here is the module uses CTS/RTS handshaking, which is currently a bit of a rough spot with Arduino. Another deal breaker may be the words above that say "requires external RS232 transceiver IC". I dunno. I'll look at this again soon and see if any progress can be made.

Bluetooth Dongle Crap

Yesterday I mentioned that my new Bluetooth adapter was packaged in an odd case. Although I found the "deal" on bargain jack, the crap came from meritline. Other than selling the device, meritline did nothing wrong, the transaction was smooth,they did fast shipping and I'll definitely buy more crap from them in the future.

The actual bluetooth device isn't much bigger than a quarter but was in a case pretending to be much more.

Okay. I'm being tough on them by calling a a device crap that actually works. It does appear to work just fine with my cell phone and other bluetooth devices, I just had a problem using any stack other than Toshiba's to pair with a wiimote. That plastic stick masquerading as an antenna just gets me. Why would they do that? To get suckers like me to buy their crap.

The bluetooth chip is Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) but I can't quite make out the markings. As you can tell, my camera is not the best at taking close-ups. It appears to read BC212 015BD A21AA. I'm guessing that it's one of CSR's BlueCore3 ROMs. A quick Google leads to quite a few hits - I'll need to look into this in more detail.

Also talked yesterday about the BlueTunes app that lets me use a wiimote as a remote control for Media Player. Even though the crap adapter pairs with my cellphone all the way across the house, I've found that unless the wiimote stays about 10 feet from the adapter, BlueTunes reports a problem and puts up an error dialog every few seconds. When I noticed the problem, I had over 100 dialogs that I had to click OK. Cool app, dumb bug.

wiimote 01

Finally some success. Ever since a friend showed me Johnny Chung Lee's wiimote projects, I've been wanting to try 'em out for myself. It's taken me a few weeks but I finally had something working this weekend.

The coolest wiimote app that I've tried so far is bluetunes. My laptop can be across the room and I can sit on the couch and wave the wiimote around to change tracks, up/down the volume, and play/pause. Yeah, nothing amazing but I'm lazy when it comes to music and remotes.

Now I'm messing with Johnny Lee's whiteboard app but I lack a good IR source. I'm using my tv remote and it kinda works but not very reliable. Tomorrow, I'm going to break open an old remote to make an IR pen.

I think I told you the story about my lost bluetooth adapter. A while back I bought an adapter to use with my gumstix. I've looked everywhere for that thing but it's now been declared MIA. So this past week, I bought another adapter thru a deal for $8.99 that I found at bargainjack.com. Remember kids - you get what you pay for. See that really cool antenna? Fake. It's just a plastic stick. See the thumb drive sized case? Empty. The whole actual bluetooth card is about the size of the USB plug. It's like a bag of potato chips. All air and a tiny board. No idea why they did that. The adapter works pretty well and pairs with my cell phone on the other side of the house so it has range. Just weird crap.

The new adapter came with BlueSoleil drivers which seem to work ok with my cell phone and my GPS but just wouldn't work with the wiimote. It would discover the device as "Nintendo RVL-CNT-01" but then wouldn't start the Human Interface Device (HID) service. During the 23 odd times of installing/uninstalling/reinstalling, I saw that I also had a Toshiba bluetooth stack installed but I couldn't get it working with the wiimote either so it was dumped.

I then tried the widcomm drivers but they didn't work at all with my adapter. No fault of the drivers, they've worked for me before. I was losing patience and probably didn't spend enough time with them.

I've finally reinstalled the Toshiba bluetooth and it works great. Unfortunately, it says it's a 30 day trial but has no option to buy.

The final secret for it to work for me seems to be pressing and holding down the the wiimote keys during both the discovery and pairing process. When the software asks you to type in a pairing key, type nothing and just hit return.