Bluetooth Bleuart and Windows 10 Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

[liquidsquid793]

So sorry to keep needing support here. Initially I messed up the Clue trying to get the Bluetooth demos working. I had the bleuart multi "working" in the sense I was able to pair it, then I went to try the Central bleuart demo, and after that I could no longer upload images to the Clue. I recovered with a double-press on the reset, and put a different UF2 image on the board, and then I could get at it again.

Definitely in learning mode here, and reminding myself that learning any new dev platform is a bit of work. C++ is one of the few languages I never tackled, and that kind of hurts on this platform.

Anyhow, I have a good Intel Bluetooth adapter as part of my motherboard (very recent) running under Windows 10 and can pair near any Bluetooth device to it. I can pair Bluetooth to the Clue as "Bluefruit52" What doesn't happen is no UART is enumerated when this pairing occurs. Otherwise everything appears fine. Things I am reading online about this sort of thing is not very promising under Windows 7 or greater.

Do I have any hope of getting data wirelessly from the Clue to a Windows 10 box? I notice there are no Windows 10 apps to demonstrate this, so I am getting bummed that may not be an option.

Is there another way to utilize the Bluetooth under Windows? Use HID or some other method to get data to the PC for logging?

Thanks for any insights.
-Mark

[mikeysklar]

Mark,

Since you are not already familiar with Arduino C would it make more sense to use CircuitPython? We do have some logging examples that a rather simple and based on the same nRF52 that the CLUE is using:

https://learn.adafruit.com/a-logger-for ... log-to-ble

Another option that our guides tend to lean towards is logging data to Adafruit IO.

[liquidsquid793]

Thanks,

I got confirmation from my software coworkers that getting a UART over BT working on a Windows 10 box to emulate as a UART device would require a fair amount of effort. I would be better off using a 2nd external BT radio as a BT to UART/USB bridge dongle. Far easier to deal with, and cheaper. This is to get a fairly complex dial/charting application I already have written in C# to receive data from this project. It has all of the groundwork laid.

I may give that a look and see about Python. I haven't yet dabbled in Python, so I am a little cautious of taking up yet another language. I am comfortable in C and C#, just not C++ object oriented for extending the graphics classes. I have a ton of graphics related stuff I put together in C# over the years for grins, so it may port over fairly well, not including things that need gradients and filled polys. Maybe I will concentrate on the basic stuff first before seeing if I can bring over some old libraries. Just excited to get my hands on a board like this to what can be done for so little money and share the work that otherwise goes unused.

I am finally getting a grip on Arduino, especially when I use the External editor setting and use Visual Studio Code. Once I figured out the include paths that Arduino shields me from until I turn on verbatim, the Code editor's navigation kicks in, and that is a huge help/step to exposing the public interfaces for easy use and learning. I still cannot get Code to perform the actual builds and debugging as there is some strange trickery in Arduino I haven't figured out yet. For now the combo of the two tools is working.

//Unrelated background info:

Attached is a chart from one of my home projects using a DSC processor and a combination of magnetic/electrical field antennas to direction-find lightning strikes. I used a simple USB/Serial converter to log to the PC and create these charts. I haven't run it in a while since the database grew to 4GB and bogged down my machine. It detects lightning around the entire world so over the coarse of running it 8 years... it recorded a lot of data. Red = cloud-to-cloud, blue is cloud-ground. Diameter is related to distance/strength. The very small dots are storms in the Florida area recorded from WNY. Curved groups are individual storms passing by relatively closely.

I stopped developing it after 2008 since the antenna ferrite cores required me purchasing an entire ammo can of them for a few $K to initially produce when the economy tanked. It only needs someone to host a database so triangulation can be performed server-side and regurgitated for mapping. I am not a server/DB guy.

Would love to finally get it on the market some day, let me know if Adafruit is interested. Converting it to wireless and having enough memory on-board to let it accumulate data without requiring a PC to be on, would be nice. The DSC was fast, but had a puny memory map.

Thanks again for help. My moisture sensors still have not arrived (from Digikey), but I have most of the plumbing together.

[mikeysklar]

Mark,

Very cool project tracking lightning strikes. I lived in the second most hit state in the US for 15 years and can see a lot of applications in the future (fire tracking / energy harvesting). Did you ever work with a David Lowenfels?

Did you try the BLEUart example code we provide for the nRF52 based boards?

https://learn.adafruit.com/bluefruit-nr ... de/bleuart

[liquidsquid793]

I have never heard of David, though my Uncle who was a professor at Albany told me about a patent on this method that ran out the very same year I came up with this. I got the idea from a sound card method that was fairly imprecise by comparison as an open-source project, mostly in Europe. The key is simultaneous conversion and the antennas themselves. There is nothing particularly magical about the unit, but getting antennas together that ignore electrical, and are properly directional in only magnetic is how to get better than 1 degree resolution. They do have a blind spot due to tangent, but it is small. Was thinking a third magnetic antenna, but saw no need if triangulation became a thing when server-based data processing.

The conundrum is leaving something like this connected to the PC during a stormy night. I prefer to unplug everything. If you loose power, no capture. Porting this to something with a SPI flash to store data until you are connected back to a PC is key along with battery operation.