This Christmas, my brother was kind enough to get me a great new toy to play with: a Bluefruit Feather! It’s a Bluetooth capable board with input and output pins for controlling objects, collecting information, or just about anything if you properly engineer the attachments.
So far my knowledge of working with this cool board is in the infancy stage. I’m not sure that I’m crawling yet, probably just rolling over at this stage of the game, but I’m already having fun! At present it has 3 blinking lights that are constantly flashing. A yellow light for USB connectivity, a blue light for Bluetooth connectivity, and a red light that I think is either power, or a charging indicator (I don’t currently have a battery for it, but it is supposed to charge the battery through the USB connection).
I did have a little bit of trouble connecting to it with my Android phone, so I thought I’d share my process here, so maybe you will not have to figure out the problem on your own if you get one of these impressive little gadgets.
First, I downloaded the app from the Play Store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adafruit.bluefruit.le.connect
But you can also download the source code for the app and build it yourself here:
https://github.com/adafruit/Bluefruit_LE_Connect_Android
After installing the app, I turned on the Bluetooth of my Android Marshmallow phone, plugged in the Bluefruit Feather board to a USB port for power, and paired wirelessly to it from my phone. So far, so good.
Then I opened up the app. The app did not list my board. Refreshing didn’t help either. There was a brief pop up that I missed because I was click happy, so I exited the app and opened it again to find that in Marshmallow, to be able to see the board, location services needed to be turned on in the phone.
Easy enough, so I went to settings -> location, and turned on location services. But it still didn’t work. Turns out I had to turn on “high accuracy” on my phone in the location settings to get it to work. Once that was done, the app could now find my paired Bluefruit Feather!
There look like a lot of really cool functions that you can do with the app. I am looking forward to trying it out!
Linux – keep it simple.
Glad to hear you are making progress with that. I wish I could comment more with some great ideas, but I’m still trying to find time to play around more with my Uno and haven’t learned so much yet. At one point I got a lisp interpreter installed on my Uno and that was fun. I suppose with your Java programming skills you should be able to dive into that app source code and maybe hack out your own apps for it.
Stay tuned for my big feather project! Bluetooth autostart!