Arduino and RF to FTDI Breakout Board

Hi all,

Ok I'm getting on great with the Arduino but am now experimenting with RF.

I purchased a simple transmitter/receiver pair running at 433Mhz.

My Arduino runs great on my MAC and is output a string of characters in a loop. I have a FTDI breakout board connected to my PC and that is running putty to read the serial data.

Now, when I connect the RX of the serial board directly to the tx of the arduino digital out I see the string of characters just fine. When I fit the RF chips in line (TX from the MAC, and RX to the PC) I see nothing.

I even purchased another type of RF pair today and still no joy at all.

Isn't it this simple? I was using the 'Making Things Talk' as a reference.

I followed the steps in the Making Things Talk book, with the RF transmitter and receiver pair from Sparkfun. Worked as advertised, although there was a lot of noise. I'd check the wiring, and make sure that RX and TX are connected correctly.

Thanks for the reply.

I checked the wiring and for some reason I still cant fathom I isolated the 5v and gnd by wiring the RF receiver to a separate circuit and it worked. If I try to run the receiver from the FTDI breakout 5v and GND it doesnt work?

At least I got a result.

Which FTDI breakout board are you using? I have this one:

Along with these RF devices:

They are the 315MHz models, but I was able to power the receiver from the +V of the breakout board.