[Swansea Hackspace] help with pic to bluetooth

[Justin Mitchell]

On Tue, 2013-09-17 at 14:04 +0100, roger wrote:
> Hi there
> Anyone interested in helping me with a project to connect a pic -> 
> bluetooth project
> Initially I want to be able to use
> 
> variable voltage  -> pic-device->blue tooth  ------ blue tooth to 
> (mobile device/pc)
> 
> This could be used in all sorts of projects including data loggers / 
> robots / pc / scopes/ test equipment etc.
> 
> I do have several blue tooth transmitters and some pics and a pic 
> programmer.
> I probably have the programing experience to sort out the 
> android/pc/ipad side of things.
> Being a php/c#/vb/perl programmer
> 
> My area of lacking is the pic programming/blue tooth  side of the equation.
> I have a jy-mcu 3.6v-6v blue tooth module.
> 
> Is it possible to get a pic with blue tooth included or do you have to 
> purchase a seperate blue tooth module.
I don't think anyone makes microcontrollers with bluetooth onboard, it
always requires an external module, usually one that has all the
relevant approvals attached.

I have a couple of modules on order (from hongkong) at the moment,
everyone seems to be selling more or less the same ones, and they appear
as just a normal ttl serial port, talk to it with the uart on your
chosen PIC.

Afaics before they connect they will talk AT commands, so you can
configure baud rate etc, then once paired and connected to a bluetooth
device they act just as a serial port.  on the PC end it will appear as
an rfcomm device.

So programming the PIC side will be the usual serial port handling, as
covered in one of my earlier tutorials, and is something that will be
covered again in the near future.