Over the weekend I took a side trip with my AVC processor to include a wireless BlueTooth transceiver. This will allow me to communicate with the robot as I run various experiments. It turned out to be fairly easy.I have used the RN-42 in the past on other work projects. These look to the embedded and the host (PC) side just like a serial port. You do need to configure the RN-42 and the host to get various parameters configured properly. These mostly consist of the baud rate, PIN, and host name.
Out of the box the RN-42 is configured for 115200 baud. This was an issue as my current test bed Arduino can’t deal with such a high baud rate using the SoftwareSerial bit-bang library. So I sloowed it down to 9600 for right now with the intent to crank it up to the fastest that can be handled by the system.
During this adventure, suddenly the magnetomer started to saturate and display 4096. I could get it to work again by lowering the gain but at a lack of sensitivity. And then a day later, the original sensitive gain worked fine. I wonder what happened there? Some device with a magnetic field turned on? Perhaps the ballast on my articulated florecent magnifier lamp? Who knows.