Bluetooth
If you’re in the workforce or even a student that occupies a desk, you most likely have a pair of earphones or headphones that you’re prepared to pop in. As a student in NYC, i know the overwhelming feeling of trying to concentrate but you can’t because of the noise pollution from the streets or even campus. What else is going to get me through my 9–5 other than some hard core Adele?
When I was younger, I remember playing video games with wired controllers where the cables were about 20 feet long and anyone was a victim to tripping on it. Nowadays, it seems that we’ve tackled that inconvenience by making most things wireless…even things that weren’t necessarily spatially intrusive. Someone thought, “I really hate this wire coming off of my headphones. I really just wraps around my fingers the wrong way” or whatever the excuse was and now we have seen a splurge of wireless bluetooth earphones and headphones. But what is bluetooth and why did they give is such a silly name?
Long story short, the name “bluetooth” came from the10th century King of Denmark by the name of Harold Bluetooth Blatand. The technology used his name as an omege to his achievement of uniting tribes of Denmark to make a kingdom. Mind blowing, I know !!
What it do and how it be?
In simplest terms, bluetooth is the connectivity of devices. Genius explanation. Bluetooth requires a signal and some hardware. On the hardware side, both devices need an antenna supplied chip that can encode, decode, and transmit data through an antenna.Essentially a singular device would need a transmitter and a receiver. The device that is set to be discoverable emits a pinging signal that can be found by other bluetooth enabled devices. Once you’ve linked the two devices, you’ve created something called a “piconet”.
Its a network of radio waves communicating back and forth between devices. The frequency of the radio waves operates between 2.4 and 2.485 Ghz. It’s important to note that the signal is not on a singular frequency but rather hops around different frequencies between the operating ranges which are infinite. It changes frequency 1600 times per second to keep bluetooth signal connection between devices and prevent static from other competing signals such as wifi which uses the same radio waves to operate. This frequency hopping technology makes bluetooth very secure.
H O W . T O . M A K E . I T
For this this you’ll need a smartphone, arduino microcontroller, an arduiono bluetooth module and an LED. The bluetooth module has for connections which he explains thoroughly. The important thing here is to to connect the moduls transmitter tot the arudionos receiving port and to connect the modules receiver to the arduinos transmitter port. The arudiono as has a small circuit board where you’ll be attaching you small LED.
Using the arduino software, we can start coding which I wont’ show here. But basically you’ll make variable for the led pins as well as for on and off states. From there you’ll make a for loop with the conditionals being set to the variables you defined for on and off and the response would be the light turning on or off. Then arduino is nice enough to proved us an iOS app to use our invention!
