Adding Bluetooth to Vex

[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by foobert

ok. i have been confused.

my controller is still sandwiched in the middle of my squarebot so i was unable to actually look at it and see the labels on anything. i was under the impression that you were referring to the i/o pins labelled rx and tx on the top side of the controller. connect your blue tooth module to them.

rx1 and rx2 on the back, (?), side of the controller are not serial ports. they are for connecting the vex radio receivers. they wouldn't know an rs232 protocol if it jumped up and bit them on the... well, you know. they expect six channels of pwm data which your bluetooth module will be unlikely to produce.

sorry for the confusion.

mea culpa.

I wouldn't say they aren't serial - they are somehow modulated as there are only 4 conductors there and you have 6 chans of PWM there, so something has to happen to squeeze that onto 4 pins. I would guess, however, that it isn't RS232 but rather some proprietary protocol. If you knew the protocol that was sent there you could use another PIC to convert RS232 to that protocol, but that would be pretty pointless and a lot more work, unless you didn't want to spend $100 on a Vex programming kit and already had a PIC programmer.

I think what foobert is referring to are the TX/RX TTL pins on the same header as the Analog In/Digital IO ports. Note that to do full RS232 you likely need a level converter as well, as I'm pretty sure they are only TTL level.