IR vs Bluetooth control.

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IR vs Bluetooth control.

By using a second Arduino Nano with an IR receiver, I can reliably control another Nano (running FastLED) that’s connected to an LED strip. I haven’t tried using Bluetooth (with my Android) yet.

Any thoughts/suggestions on reliability, cost, difficulty of doing this with Bluetooth vs the IR method?

I can buy Bluetooth boards from http://aliexpress.com for about the same price as a Nano 3.0.

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Bluetooth doesn’t need to be line of sight. You can hide it inside your project.

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i bought a few cheap bluetooth modules and they work great, it was extremely easy to work with the code.

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Adding BT to your project is piss easy. There are a bunch of android apps that allow you to pass whatever string you want to your arduino. Look for apps by Next Prototypes - work great for developing. https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=NEXT+PROTOTYPES

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I use the HC-05 BT modules - you can pick them up for under $10 ea. I recently bought 30 for under $5 ea. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/10pcs-LOT-HC05-JY-MCU-anti-reverse-integrated-Bluetooth-serial-pass-through-module-HC-05-master/1576764322.html

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I hear from various little birdies that rfduino support is on the way—and there are also boards like the Dfrobot Bluno and Bluno Nano which will work now. That’s the direction I’m planning on going in.

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I prefer a $2.50 Nano and a $4.80 BT module over a $40 custom board…

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@Mike_Thornbury - I’ve another 10 Nano’s on order and will get a couple of HC06’s to start. Like you said, they’re cheap, cheap, cheap.

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I’m interested in lower-level control, not just passing commands over a serial connection. Now I think of it, I hope the RFduino library allows me low level control of the BTLE advertisement packets, et al.

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Anyone know of any cheap BLE modules? Freaking iPhone won’t support SPP on standard bluetooth, but with a BLE module from what I understand you can actually use it from an iphone app as a serial output.

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Yeah, you have to be an MFI program member to get to the normal Bluetooth stack on the iPhone, but BLE is wide open. Maybe this does what you want (I haven’t used it, but it seems good): http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=1073

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@Buddy_Smith I paid $7 for a CC2541 central/peripheral (BT 4.0 LE) module. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Class-2-Bluetooth-Specification-V4-0-BLE-Memory-256k-UART-Interface-CC2541-CC41-A-Bluetooth-Module/1906498572.html