Hi Bluetooth developers
today I received the brandnew DKBT Bluetooth Smart Ready Development Kit including the following parts:
DKBT Development Kit main board BT121 Bluetooth Smart Ready carrier board Micro USB cable 1.5V AAA battery Printed Quickstart guide and EULA Of course the moment the kit was in my mailbox was exciting enough, but after I flipped over the first page of the quickstart guide, I saw illustrations of BLExplr, my BLE explorer app which is available in the Apple App Store, describing the use of the Bluetooth Smart demo with iOS.
Hello Makers!
A while ago Matthias Ringwald @mringwal (co-founder of BlueKitchen GmbH) and I were discussing a BTstack port for AVR-based embedded systems such as the Arduino. As an outcome, we co-designed the BTstack LE Arduino Shield which is now available for sale at Seeedstudio’s Bazaar.
The BTstack LE Arduino Shield is supported on the following boards – with at least 64 kB Flash (tested with Arduino.cc IDE v1.6.4):
Arduino Mega 2560 R3 Arduino Mega 2560 Arduino Mega 1280 Sparkfun Mega 3.
Hello everyone,
after there was some interest in the Bluetooth RFID Reader I created 2 years ago now (http://www.mkroll.mobi/?page_id=202), I decided to publish all files necessary to create one on github. On github (https://github.com/michaelkroll/BT-RFID-Reader) you can find the eagle design files, the Arduino sketch and the WT-12 configuration as well as STL files to create the enclosure.
Please feel free to use the files. Let me know once you created something or need help to set it up.
After creating the BLE Shield for Arduino it is time to create some projects with it to show you what can be done using the shield.
Now it is time to create a simple RFID Tag Reader using the BLE Shield. In order to stack such a device together, I grabbed the following out of my “Arduino Box”:
1 x Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V 1 x Adafruit PN532 NFC/RFID Controller Shield for Arduino 1 x Seeddstudio Solar Charger Shield v0.
Finally I managed to finalize this project with a Video Podcast showing you how to pair the RFID-Reader with an iPhone and Tag an ISO14443A tag. Enjoy the video!
The Bluetooth RFID Reader pages in the hardware section has been updated now. I finally added pictures of the RFID Reader in a plastic enclosure printed by shapeways.com to the post. I’m currently preparing a short demo video showing the RFID reader connected to the iPhone in action.
As I finished my first reflow soldered hardware project, I added a short story covering the assembly of the Bluetooth RFID Tagreader.
On November 16th I visited BlueGiga at the Medica Exhibition in Düsseldorf Germany. Thank you to Janne and Enrico for the demo of the new BLE112 evaluation board and the interesting discussions on Bluetooth Low Energy. It was the first time I was able to see the evaluation board in real life. Moreover I had a chance to test my iBLE iOS App, which is a Bluetooth Low Energy explorer App running on the iPhone4S.
The initial PCB design was finished on October 17th, but since it takes some time to produce and ship it I finally received it yesterday.
After tweaking some design faults with isolated copper wire I got the RFID Reader working after about three hours. Well the firmware was already written and the WT12 configuration just needed to be downloaded to the module.
After fixing, soldering, measuring voltages, flashing firmwares here is the final assembled “Bluetooth RFID Tagreader”.
After some Bluetooth RFID Reader prototypes I created a new board which is designed to fit into an enclosure which will be printed by a 3D print service. The Reader can be connected to iOS Devices and sends the UID of a MIFARE Tag as text string into any iOS app which is capable of handling texts.
A tactile switch is added to the reader as well, in order to unhide/hide the on board keyboard on an iPhone or iPod Touch.