Bluetooth Suggestions?

Jan 21, 2006 1 Replies

I'm trying to prototype something, and am not sure even which way to go ... what I want to be able to do (in the end), is have a very small board that has only a pushbutton and an LED or two, that communicates wirelessly with something that communicates with a Linux workstation through its USB port. I've been told that Bluetooth is probably my best bet, and I have seen some nice cheap dongles that plug into the USB port and talk Bluetooth, so that takes care of one side of the equation.



Does this sound like a reasonable way to approach this problem? My degree is in EE, but it's been a very long time since I played with any hardware (been doing software mostly), so I'm better off sticking with solutions that are mostly complete, and I can just add a few resistors, LEDs, and buttons, and call it good ...



Suggestions?



Thanks! Chris


In my opinion no. Why spend time on bluetooth development when you can use off the shelf modules?

What range do you need?

For the pushbuttons I'd buy a wireless mouse and use the circuit board out of it. For a couple of LED's I'd buy a USB to serial converter, a pair of cheap 433MHz transmit and receive modules and a decoder IC to convert the serial from the rx to individual outputs. Plenty of info on the web.

Alternativly you could also feed the serial data from the reciever into a microcontroller.

Bob

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