Finished rigging up an RS232 connection to my VF1 via bluetooth connection today.

It works quite well, and was done with limited effort. Cost about ~150$ Canadian for everything.

First, I bought a USB bluetooth dongle for the computer.

Then I bought a bluetooth device that's specifically meant for RS232 communication. It has dip switches on it to change the baud rate, a power plug, and a serial port.

I made my own RS232 cable, to go from the bluetooth device to the haas (just like your standard RS232 cable to go from computer to haas.)


Set the baud rate on the bluetooth device to 38.4K and matched up all settings, iniciated a connection from the computer to the bluetooth device, and bam, just like using an rs232 cable. Tommorow I may try upping it to 57.6 :cool:

Now, the computer is in the office (150 feet away) got away with running wire, and for what I think is a fairly cheap price.

:cheers:

Here's the USB dongle for the computer: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=11222&vpn=USBBT100&manufacture=Linksys

And I'm pretty sure this is the Serial to bluetooth thingy I used
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=J04467&vpn=GBS301&manufacture=IOGEAR

Just out of interest, how does the PC software see the remote serial port? Does it need a driver/com port emulator program running? or is it network (TCP/IP)?

My own experience with some ethernet/serial adapters is that they do not always cope fully with hardware handshaking, i.e. when the CTS line goes down for any longish period of time the device starts filling its internal buffer, when that gets full, the adapter just starts throwing data away.

It is worth testing to see if this happens with your bluetooth adapter, if so then XMODEM if supported would be a great solution.

Andy

Just out of interest, how does the PC software see the remote serial port? Does it need a driver/com port emulator program running? or is it network (TCP/IP)?

My own experience with some ethernet/serial adapters is that they do not always cope fully with hardware handshaking, i.e. when the CTS line goes down for any longish period of time the device starts filling its internal buffer, when that gets full, the adapter just starts throwing data away.

It is worth testing to see if this happens with your bluetooth adapter, if so then XMODEM if supported would be a great solution.

Andy

I've tried it through DNC4U and NCSentry. Both see the remote serial port as your standard local serial port. Just tell em which port (I mapped the remote port to com 5) and the bluetooth software takes care of the rest. (Using the bluetooth software that came with the linksys usb dongle works great)

You could be quite correct, some bad things may start happening. I haven't had a chance to test it that throughly yet, but I did transfer a 200K file, and that worked great. I DNC'd a very small program (10 lines) and that worked as well.

I'm suspecting that drip feeding a large program via DNC may run into some problems. I'm hoping not.

Once interesting thing to note, when I had just a serial to parallel converter (didn't work, wasn't an RS-232 converter, doh) and I tried to send files, I would still link with the remote serial port fine, but it would only send the first 100 lines or so of a program. It then appeared to halt--temporarily. It would then send about 3 lines every minute or so. Could have been a fluke, or it could have been the buffer filling up, then dumping a bit every minute.