November’s Caption Contest @ EE Times win an Adafruit BLUEFRUIT!.
No, that ringing in your ears isn’t the applause from last month’s greatest caption, it is the sound of November’s contest arriving!
Give us your best caption to the peculiar situation depicted below for a chance to win a colored original by our fantastic artist Daniel Guidera, with your caption attached. We’ll choose the winner based on your best telephone manners, or possibly just how much you make us laugh!
This month, Adafruit has again given us a the totally awesome opportunity to give away some more toys! They’re letting us distribute 10 BlueFruit Bluetooth interfaces. Or rather, we’ll select the 10 winners, and Adafruit will send you one for free! Obviously the main winner will get one in addition to his or her own personal comic, so that leaves nine chances to at least come in as a runner-up.
If you’re unfamiliar with the BlueFruit, you should check it out. The device is seen by any Bluetooth system as a keyboard (out of the box). It is preprogrammed with the common keys needed for most computer games, but you can even program it with your own for your specific needs. Here’s an example of something done with Bluefruit. We’ve also seen a classic NES controller retrofitted for Bluetooth with it.
Bluefruit EZ-Key – 12 Input Bluetooth HID Keyboard Controller. In stock and shipping now! Create your own wireless Bluetooth keyboard controller in an hour with the Bluefruit EZ-Key: it’s the fastest, easiest and bestest Bluetooth controller. We spent years learning how to develop our own custom Bluetooth firmware, and coupled with our own BT module hardware, we’ve created the most Maker-friendly wireless you can get!
This breakout acts just like a BT keyboard, and works great with any BT-capable device: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. Power the module with 3-16VDC, and pair it to the computer, tablet or phone just as you would any other BT device. Now you can connect buttons from the 12 input pins, when a button is pressed, it sends a keypress to the computer. We pre-program the module to send the 4 arrow keys, return, space, ‘w’, ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘d’, ‘1’ and ‘2’ by default. Advanced users can reprogram the module’s keys using an FTDI or other Serial console cable, for any HID key report they desire.
You can pair multiple Bluefruit’s to a single device, each one has a unique identifier. These modules are FCC & CE certified and are RoHS-compliant so they are easy to integrate into your project.
If you want to have better control over the data sent, connect a microcontroller to the RX pin at 3-5V logic level, 9600 baud, and send ASCII data: it will be ‘typed out’ character by character. We also have support for various non-printable characters such as ESC, Shift, F1-F12, etc. as well as toggling the virtual keyboard on iOS.
Warning! Your computer/tablet/phone must have Bluetooth v2.1 or higher Many low-cost Bluetooth USB modules are v2.0 only (that’s why it was $5!) Anything built in the last 5 years with built-in BT is OK, including all Macs and iOS devices, but if you have to add BT to your desktop machine with a USB adapter, please make sure you have a v4.0 adapter, since that will definitely work!
For more details, tutorials and information check the EZ-Key tutorial
