Jun 11, 2011 | Setting up the Arduino Pro Mini and Bluetooth Mate on Mac

Jonathan Warren has a great tutorial on setting up the Bluetooth Mate with a Windows machine, but being the owner of a Mac I figured I could share some of the minor changes you need to do. For posterity I’ll list everything you need here, though a lot of it is courtesy of Jonathan.

Things you’ll need to buy from Sparkfun:

1. FTDI Basic link
2. Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V link
3. Bluetooth Mate Silver link

Things you’ll need to buy from a local Radioshack:
Pin headers, connectors – I was lazy and used what I could find, but you can definitely make the package more compact depending on what you buy.

Once you’ve bought everything, connect the FTDI to the Arduino as shown (after soldering the header pins) and program the Arduino with the sketch Jonathan provided. Make sure you’ve selected Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V 328 as your board, or else you’ll get a avrdude stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding. Once it’s uploaded, run the Serial Monitor with baud rate set to 115200 and check that you get a series of numbers printed out one after another. Typing “R” should show “RESET”.

Once that’s done, set up your Bluetooth Silver so that its pins line up with the Arduino (again, using pins as necessary, or directly soldering). Note unlike Jonathan’s tutorial the latest parts have the pins REVERSED. You can confirm that everything lines up the way it should if you make sure that you’re connecting the pin that says GND (ground) with the corresponding one on each board (see below):

Since I botched the soldering a bit mine came out like this. Note that the Arduino is upside down. Shall we get it to communicate via bluetooth, now?

On your Mac, enable Bluetooth. The best way to do this is not from the Menu Bar but from System Preferences, because we’ll ignore some warnings it gives us first. Click on “Set up new device” and then pair with the one that has RN42 something or another.

Hit “Passcode options”, then enter “1234” under “Use specific passcode”. Ignore any warnings for now. Hit continue, then Quit.

Then click on “Edit serial ports” and keep note of the Path at the very bottom.

In order to see if it’s working, open up Terminal, then type in:

screen /dev/tty.RN42-9AFD-SPP where you replace your path accordingly.

You should see your loop of numbers!