Angel’s Status Report for 2/26

This week very frustrating when it came to working on my specific part of the project: Communication between the Arduino Nano and the Raspberry Pi. After working with the HC05 Bluetooth module more, and being unable to get to it to connect to the Pi, I reached out to our TA. She sent me some resources that for using bluetooth on a Pi, and I concluded that BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy ) might give me better results. I was able to order and test out a HM10 (BLE) Bluetooth module, and was able to pair and connect it to the Pi using bluepy. However, I was still unable to send any data to the Pi. To double check that the module worked, I installed an Arduino Bluetooth app on my phone, and was able to receive the messages that I was sending out from the module. I was able to use AT commands with this module as well, so I believe the module is working correctly.

After doing some more research into the specific module, I found that it does not seem to let the user utilize any fundamental BLE capabilities such as characteristics and notification, which bluepy interacts with. Because of this, I decided to buy an Arduino Nano BLE that has BLE integrated with it, so that I have access to more features and allow bluepy to read/write data. I hope this is the piece of equipment that allows me to start the next phase, which is sending dummy data to the Pi and writing code on the Pi to decode/process the transmission and play the note if it is valid. Because of this unexpected setback, I am behind schedule, but we have some slack and mitigations in place if Bluetooth continues to be difficult.

Next week, I will keep trying to send a message with the HM10 module since it does connect to the pi and transmits, while I wait for the Arduino BLE. I may also start trying to send wifi messages since Vivian has a spare wifi module.

Setup where I’ve been connecting various bluetooth modules to the Arduino and attempting to send messages