pylon:
Don't use SoftwareSerial with the RN-XV. It's quite picky about the serial timing and the SoftwareSerial cannot fulfill the needs of the RN-XV. I never got it running using SoftwareSerial but it runs like a charm on the hardware serial.
Ah I see.
You instantiate a SoftwareSerial instance but you're printing to the hardware serial interface and read from there.
From the hardware side mine is connected using an XBee shield (from Iteadstudio) that does the level conversion for the serial pins. Without that level conversion you may have destroyed the RN-XV already, the datasheet specifies "3V3 tolerant" whatever that may mean. In the electrical characteristics the voltage is specified with 3.7V max.
Ah, I see my mistake now. What voltage does the Uno digital write at? I thought it was around 3.3v?
And since I have not been writing to the digital pins this whole time my device appears to be fine.
And thank you!