This week I worked on the Bluetooth interface for the RPi.
As it turns out, Bluetooth supports a mode in which it behaves like a serial port — something I have experience working with. After some minor consternation in setting that up, I was able to get a simple two-way serial program working in Python which forwarded data to a phone and received commands back from it.
Along the way, I made an important compromise which simplified implementation: I manually paired the phone to the RPi rather than automatically. As it turns out, pairing is only really accomplished with the bluetoothctl CLI, which I couldn’t figure out how to automate nicely. Pairing only needs to happen once per device, so this doesn’t impact our testing.
At the end of the week, I handed the device off to Nick after verifying that he could access the RPi over WiFi.
This week is spring break, and so I won’t be doing any major work; I’ll probably be acting as remote tech support if something with the RPi doesn’t work for Nick, who may be working over break.
After break, I’ll work out any discovered issues with the device and begin work on data collection when we have the infrastructure to support it.
Currently on-track.