I got that RN-42 carrier board populated and working! Its ready for the GyroSkirt driver board, once I get that built.

There are a few errors on the board. TX and RX are swapped somewhere. Either on this board or on my USB to TTL-Serial board or in the RN-42 documentation. Also it seems the LEDs were meant to go to Vcc rather than ground. As a result my LED indication for connection status and RF traffic is inverted.

I can live with the errors as the actual data transmission works like a champ. To test the tranmission I hooked the carrier board up to a PC via a USB to TTL serial converter configured to operate at 3.3V.  The venerable Hyperterminal program was used to open the virtual com port on the PC. Then I downloaded Sena’s Bluetooth terminal program to my Android phone and used it to form a Bluetooth serial connection between my phone and the modem. The result: keys pressed on my phone’s keyboard appeared inside the Hyperterminal running on the PC and keys pressed on the PC keyboard appear inside the Sena Bluetooth terminal running on my phone. Bi-directional data flow at 115,200 baud.

Now that I have proven my wireless link works, I need to update the GyroSkirt/GryoBelt firmware to allow me to adjust the gain and the deadband over the Arduino’s serial port.  (In addition to actually making a driver board that has a spot for the modem.)

I got my first batch of iTead Studio boards in!  iTead Studio is a  pcb printing shop that offers absurdly cheap prototype boards. The new boards look great. I’ll definitely use them again. It only took 2 1/2 weeks to get here. For the price its an awesome service.

The particular board shown is a carrier board for the RN-42 Bluetooth modem, which is only $15 from Sparkfun if you buy it in its surface mount form. For another $15 I now have 10 12! carrier boards that allow me to adapt the surface mount device to through hole technology as well as control infrequently utilized device specific features such as factory reset, BT Master mode, force 9600 baud and more. The more you know the cheaper electronics gets.

The carrier, populated with the modem, etc., is destined for the GyroSkirt. The idea is that I’ll be able to adjust the gain and deadband processing on the gyro sensor reading wirelessly from a program on my Android phone via the Bluetooth radio in my phone and one of these boards affixed to the GyroSkirt driver. The GyroSkirt will again be driven by an Arduino,  so I hope to leverage the Amarino library to speed my development time.