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Bluetooth Bridge

Started by pheasant_plucker, Saturday,July 18, 2015, 08:34:23

Previous topic - Next topic

pheasant_plucker

After procrastinating for a while (about 3 minutes) I decided to treat myself to a Windows 8 Tablet.
I finally settled on the Samsung Ativ 10.1 Not the fastest with the Atom processor but I have several Samsung devices and I like the styling and build quality. besides it ticks all the boxes with 2gb ram, 64gb storage and especially the S Pen and built in Walcom digitiser.
Immediately after it arrived I had to install mission planner and try it out. Perfect! runs just as fast as it does on my laptop and the connection via USB is solid. The tablet is perfect to just drop in the flight case and much more convenient than a laptop.

That';s the first part of the story  :rolleyes:
As soon as I had tried it I thought to myself that I didn';t like plugging USB cables in and out of the Tablet or the APMs so I hit on the idea of making a Bluetooth bridge.
I already had all of the parts required:
A flight side telemetry module (or a ground one that didn;t have USB)
A Bluetooth module
An FTDI to reprogram the BT

First step is to change the Baud rate on the Bluetooth module to match the telemetry which needs to be 57600 baud
This was achieved by connecting the FTDI to the BT and sending it the AT command AT+BAUD7 to change to 57600 and then i decided to rename the module so I sent the command AT+NAMEBTbridge

Once this was done it was a simple matter of disconnecting the FTDI and connecting the BT module to the Telemetry unit. The only thing you have to remember here is to cross the TX-RX wires so it';s very straight forward.
I found a suitable box and an old 1500ma 3s (overkill) so I used a voltage regulator to give me a steady 5v power supply. I suspect a single cell lipo would suffice here removing the regulator and making the box smaller and lighter too.

The hardest part of the whole project was getting Windows to work with the bluetooth.
The secret it making sure that the correct baud is set for the BT module.
In Control Panel / Devices and printers double click the paired BTbridge and then the services tab. you should see an SSP serial port and it should be ticked. Now click the Hardware tab and you will see the com port. Note it';s number as you will need that to connect. Look at it';s properties and make sure that the port is set at 57600. if not change it.
if it gives you any problems and you can';t get it to connect then I found the best solution was to unpair it, remove all of the bluetooth devices in the device manager including the ports (menu - view/show hidden) Just remove everything then reboot. pair the BT again and this time it will get a new port number. Change the baud as above and it should work straight away.
I found that if you have paired it before changing the baud from the default 9600 to 57600 it would never work again until you removed everything. It seems to keep a ghost set of parameters for that device and will not respond to changes.

I found that my android devices worked perfectly every time. Droid Planner on my S5 and Note 10.1 had no issues at all.

Once done you should now have a functioning Bluetooth bridge.

Photos to follow

Gerry
The man serving me in the canteen said "Look, You can see the face of Jesus in the Margarine" The Asian guy next to me replied "I can't believe it's not Budda"
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