I had been planning on setting up remote control of the G-35 lights via Bluetooth and iOS or Raspberry Pi. I ran into some snags though, and I will wait until the fall to continue the project.

Snag #1: Setting up Ruby with Bluetooth on Raspberry Pi

There is a library for Ruby that can interface with Bluetooth, which means I can send commands to the G-35 Arduino board from a Ruby framework like Sinatra or Rails. However it requires a newer version of the Bluetooth libraries than the one included in Raspbian Jessie. I upgraded my Raspberry Pi to Raspbian Stretch to add newer libraries, and the upgrade works but it caused the Bluetooth module on the Pi to “disappear”. As in, I couldn’t detect it from software using the newer Bluetooth library. I tried downgrading the Bluetooth library, and then installing from source, but neither restored Bluetooth access. At this point I was tired of dealing with it and stopped working on the project.

The Pi’s bluetooth started working again in January though. Not sure what I did to fix it, maybe running updates helped.

Snag #2: Bluetooth Shield for Arduino

It stopped working in January. Using the testing Arduino code that sets up a bi-directional terminal between USB and the Bluetooth module, I no longer can get AT commands to work properly. I send the command, and there is no response from the module. It is set to 5V (to match the Arduino).

However I can get it to respond to AT commands if I send them immediately after pressing the restart button on the Bluetooth shield. It then stops responding a second later. This makes me believe that the jumpers are set correctly. But I am not sure why it is failing.

Because of these issues I chose to put the project on hold. I do however have some new projects planned and I hope to detail my work on the blog as I figure them out.