Ok, to summarize the points made in this thread:
- You need to jumper this board to unused data pins on your own particular ardunio project. It can be jumpered for pins 0-7. In my case, I'm using it on a DFRobotShop rover with a v1.5 board. On this device, pins 5-8 are used for motor control and pins 0 & 1 are hardware serial. So, I jumpered it for pins 3 and 4.
- The labels for the pins on this shield are correct. However, you always connect the TX pin of a shield to the RX pin of arduino and vice versa. So it appears that they are labeled incorrectly since when you code, you do it from the perspective of the arduino board. ie: coding TX to pin 1 on arduino means I would jumper RX pin 1 to the digital bus on the shield so it would receive the signals transmitted on pin 1.
- Many devices with BT 4.0 stacks can't see this device even if it is in pairing mode (red/green flashing). Forget it if you have any iDevice; IOS doesn't support Bluetooth's Serial Port Profile. Android is your best bet here. I successfully paired it with a Galaxy Nexus running Kitkat.
- I highly recommend the Bluetooth Serial Controller Android app for this shield.
When you are writing your sketch, set the pins that you have jumpered when you define SoftwareSerial. In my case, where digital pin 3 on the shield is jumpered to transmit and 4 is jumpered to receive, I define it thusly:
SoftwareSerial BluetoothSerial(4,3).
Now I can send the ASCII commands that this board needs using my definition:
BluetoothSerial.print("")
That's it.