Hi Advent,
I'm new here and bought an Arduiono BT version. I'm reading and reading. Esspecially the BT11 manuals and also the comments here on the forum. I get the feeling that if I had bought the Arduino and the BT11 separate I would be more flexible. Apart from the split power supplies. When seperate you can connect the devices direct to your pc, albeit with levelshifters. You can later connect the tx and rx pins of the Arduino and BT11 together and run your program. You can test the program separately. When you get a deadlock situation of the Arduino BT you need a separate programmer to get the BT11 going. I don't know if you can get a deadlock when you send command to the BT11 by the pc serial port. But the datastream of your program is going by RF and when you set the BT in a state where you cannot get a connection anymore because the BT is polling around or whatever, wrong serial speed you cannot save it. It is'n defect but you have to load the default program to get it working again. When separate you connect the BT11 to the pc and send a escape sequence (read it somewhere but have to check it again).
Now I'thinking about how ik can overcome this when I send commands to the BT11 such as: SET CONTROL INIT RESET .. . When reset it sets itself again in a state it can communicate whit the arduino BT by RF.
Just some thoughts. Now I'm going on reading the manual(s).
btkoll