Post #10: Some Progress, Some not so much

I've made a good step forward, and like with all engineering projects, a step back.  First the good.

The Good (wiring)

I think I have the wiring situation figured out.  I ordered some parts from Jameco: 6 different colors of 22AWG stranded hookup wire, some female pins to crimp on the end and while I was there, I found the specified power connector for the PIXY, a 2 pin female MOLEX connector so that I can power the PIXY separately instead of drawing current out of the Arduino.  I'm thinking this is going to be better as the PIXY seems to want to draw some current driving those servo's around.

The Good (first Arduino Sketch)

Output of Compass Module

I have written my first Arduino sketch (See it here).  I hooked up the compass module, started with the adafruit base and sensor libraries, and it went together pretty smoothly. Once the basic sketch was working, I began modifying it to remove all the bad things you don't want to have running in a real production Arduino script, like "delay" functions.  I replaced all the delay functions with a Timer function so that the loop can keep running, we just won't hit the compass every time through the loop. The picture on the right here shows the Arduino sketch running and reading from the compass the current heading information and converting that into Degrees!  That was an easy peasy thing to do, giving me hope the rest of the project is going to be this easy! :)

The Bad (Bluetooth not so easy)

The simplest hookup possible

Well, of course, I should have expected it.  No engineering project is ever easy, if it was, they wouldn't need engineers I suppose. I wired up the Bluetooth module and it seemed to work.  I was able to pair up my windows pc and my android phone, so far so good!  NOT SO FAST. The Serial protocol won't stand up properly. After several hours of messing around with it using both my Android phone and my Windows 8 laptop, nothing seems to be able to get the Serial protocol to start. So I opened a help ticket with the good folks at Adafruit.com (where I bought it).  If you click on that link you should be able to see the support request and the pictures I included to help them help me.

Hopefully Adafruit can tell me what I'm doing wrong and I can move forward! :). If not, when I get my wiring parts I'll hook up the IR proximity sensors.  I found some libraries that help stabilize the readings from them and make them more useful.  More on that in the next post!

Thanks for reading.