Reading serial input over bluetooth

Hi

I’m using a sparkfun bluetooth mate gold connected to a lilypad arduino to communicate with a beaglebone black (revC debian 7) via node-red.

The bluetooth appears to connect fine , the green light is constant on mate-gold , and rfcomm0 shows as being open @ 9700-N-1 via terminal. But the node-red output shows that rfcomm0 cannot be read.

Does anyone know how I should proceed to debug this project?? (Am kinda new to the hardware side of things)

I also have a raspberry pi kicking around if anyone has done anything similar on this platform instead.

Thanks in advance.