Sunday, April 6, 2014

HC-06 Bluetooth Slave Only

I bought a Bluetooth adaptor from eBay a while back and configured it allow me to login to the Raspberry Pi over Bluetooth.
As part of this I changed some of the settings on the adaptor and like a proper hacker didn't write down the changes anywhere and then lost my code when the Raspberry Pi SD got corrupted and I installed Lubuntu on my netbook (was XP).

After doing a lot of searching online I found details for the HC-05 and how to reset it by setting the Key pin HIGH and putting it into command mode.

After about 5 hours of messing with the adaptor and even noting the Key breadboard pin wasn't connect to the Key pin on the board, so shorted the pads on the back of the board. Then desoldered again

Nothing worked.

Then checked if what I really had was a HC-06. The Slave only version of the HC-05 board and guess what it is an HC-06 board and so the Key HIGH method doesn't work.

Note the little transistor near the header
Haven't seen this on any of the HC-05 modules
Also, on the back of the board there are 2 sets of pads not populated.

But from reading the following Google DOC (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GPVqL9jlnIKFUL0lRGdRNrYFvxKRR-yjNSRYhlr1j84/edit) discovered you can reset the HC-06 by setting PIN 11 to LOW on the module.
I did this, cycled the power and now I could connect at 9600.  All good.

I downloaded the Sketch from here: http://www.plastibots.com/index.php/2013/12/31/hc-06-bluetooth-module-getting-this-sucker-into-at-command-mode/
And it worked.

So, no Master mode (cannot initiate pairing) but it's now working so I can have some proper fun with it.