I’m having some issues keeping my BlueSMiRF unit connected for extended periods of time. My project is remote temperature and humidity sensing and I want to have updates every 30 seconds or so. What I’ve run in to is the BlueSMiRF connection will drop after a few hours of being connected. Sometimes it will work for almost 24 hours and other times, no more than two or three.
Signal strength isn’t a problem, according to the BlueZ utilities (hcitool) and I have moved the BS unit a few feet, line of sight from the Bluetooth dongle.
If I release and reestablish the connection with the BlueSMiRF, everything works fine for another three to 24 hours.
I’ve been using a Bluesmirf to talk to a desktop machine (which has a cheapo usb bluetooth dongle) without any apparent problems. I’ve been sending data every 10-100 seconds for a week or so at a time without any connection problems.
My host machine is running Mac OS X, just talking to the bluetooth interface through an emulated tty (serial port) from python.
I changed to a different host machine last week, one with a builtin bluetooth adapter, and now it drops the connection every few hours. I think it’s just a signal-strength issue though. I haven’t diagnosed it yet.
Is it possible that you have some kind of intermittent interference (microwave oven?) that occasionally jams the bluetooth signal?
wiml:
I’ve been using a Bluesmirf to talk to a desktop machine (which has a cheapo usb bluetooth dongle) without any apparent problems. I’ve been sending data every 10-100 seconds for a week or so at a time without any connection problems.
My host machine is running Mac OS X, just talking to the bluetooth interface through an emulated tty (serial port) from python.
I changed to a different host machine last week, one with a builtin bluetooth adapter, and now it drops the connection every few hours. I think it’s just a signal-strength issue though. I haven’t diagnosed it yet.
Is it possible that you have some kind of intermittent interference (microwave oven?) that occasionally jams the bluetooth signal?
I believe interference might be the most likely cause. However, this happens at times when the microwave wouldn’t be in use, so it could well be something else.
What I find strange is if I manually restart the shell script I’m using, everything starts working again. It’s strange because the script resets the entire Bluetooth subsystem on the computer, so there should be no difference between the script running and me manually resetting components.
I’m trying a difference approach now, but it can take a while before the failure occurs.