Setting up a Bluetooth serial adapter like the SparkFun BlueSMiRF isn’t very hard, but not very intuitive.
Bluetooth supports many “profiles” for doing various things (phone headset, address book syncing, file exchange, etc.) One of these profiles is the “COM” profile and is a simple serial port: raw binary data transmit and receive. That’s the profile these Bluetooth serial adapters speak. All Bluetooth stacks on computers appear to support the COM profile.
The SparkFun BlueSMiRF module speaks only the COM profile and when powered on and set up, looks just like a normal serial port to software. In truth it looks a little like a modem, because you can escape into a “command mode” that has an AT-compatible configuration language.
The full steps are below.
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