What do you power your Arduino BT with?

Our Arduino BT just arrived today thanks to uber fast shipping and 'excellent' customer service from sgbotic!

I've read the power supply can be 5.5 volts or under, is there any particular type of battery to use? can rechargeables be used? packs?

What do you power your BT using ?

It actually has to be between 7v and ~25v I think. 7 - 12v recommended.
The actual chip requires 5v but the voltage regulator provides that from the higher voltage input.

I use a adjustable voltage 1A power pack set to 9v and it works rather well.

Thanks!, I interpreted this:-

"The use of a DC-DC convertor, allowing the board to be powered with a minimum of 1.2 V, but with a maximum of 5.5 V. Higher voltages or reversed polarity in the power supply will kill the board."

From here

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardBluetooth

As

"minimum 1.2 V - maximum 5.5 V"

Some of the documentation leaves much to the imagination, shouldn't it read:-

"The use of a DC-DC convertor, allowing the board to be powered with a minimum of 7 V, up to maximum of 12 V. Higher voltages or reversed polarity in the power supply will kill the board."

?

Well, it says: "Higher voltages or reversed polarity in the power supply will kill the board." I wouldn't take the risk. If you look at the datasheet of the voltage regulator you can see that 5.5 V is the maximum.
Cheater, I don't know why you think it is between 7-12 V. Did you come to this conclusion before you had a multimeter? :wink: Do you know the question is about the bluetooth arduino?

I powered it with 2 AA battery's, with a GPS module attached to it and took the 3.3V from the BT module to feed a dataflash chip. Works perfect. Except that the battery's didn't last very long. The GPS was a bit too much I think.

Thanks!

Would this be over the top?

? Li-ion 5VDC/1A
? Output voltage: 5VDC
? Output current: 1000mA max
? Capacity: 3400mAh

quite expensive, they recharge via USB, used as a portable charger for ipods and cell phones.

I'd still like to know what others are using, I don't think 2 AA's will be suffice for my needs.

Cheater, I don't know why you think it is between 7-12 V. Did you come to this conclusion before you had a multimeter? :wink: Do you know the question is about the bluetooth arduino?

I assumed too much. :slight_smile:
You learn something new every day.

No worries, I would have started at the bottom anyway, and I don't plan to touch it until more BT owners have told me what they use as a power source, there must be more than the 3 of us, I know Daniel's got lots of them stashed under his bed - what are you plugging them into Daniel???

What the heck, I'll start with 3 AA's (a whopping 4.5v!) and say hello

What do you want to power with it John? For me the 2 rechargable AA's lasted only a few hours. I think the efficiency of the DC converter wasn't very with good the GPS attached to it. But I didn't bother to measure the current draw over time with or without the GPS.
I am using the BT arduino now for a temperature logger. I don't know yet how I will power it. If I can find a suitable adaptor then I will use it, otherwise it is going to be 2 AA's again. Now there is only an LCD display attached to it so I expect that the batteries will last a bit longer.

I think the Li-ion 5VDC lasts forever and is good for 500 cycles, it's not big either so it would make a nice companion ... but, I'm a little wary of the BT, so I was hoping to get a sample of what other people are using.

The 2 AA's worked fine, I guess I could juice up the NG and get it doing the heavy work and use the BT as a comms middleman, but if I can stack it with the Li-ion then there wouldn't be the need for a double up.

I need to power a couple of small relays, read several inputs and an rfid on demand, the rfid needs at least 5v, so I've got a couple of options but I'd prefer to go with the one that requires the least number of boards :slight_smile:

Here's some notes regarding setting up the BT on Win XP

  • don't install Bluesoleil, let XP's bluetooth set up do the talking
  • works with Arduino 7, so far

OSX10.3.9

  • can't connect to the BT, Arduino 7, 8, or 9

I haven't read anything "official" about that, that's just the way it happened when I spent several hours trying