Review on 🔗 DSD TECH HM-10 Bluetooth 4.0 BLE iBeacon UART Module & 4PIN Base Board for Arduino UNO R3, Mega 2560 & Nano by Tracy Martin

I got this device to add Bluetooth capabilities to my Teensy project. Unlike the Arduino schematics poster, connecting to Teensy is very simple. Just connect GND to GND, VCC to 5V. Then RX and TX to RXn and TXn (blue on the pinout). Then you work with your code as you would with a USB serial connection, but instead of Serial.print() you should use Serialn.print(), where n is the number of the serial port that you also have connected. That's all! So, with some basic code, you can receive Serial AT commands from your computer to transmit to your Bluetooth module. With an application like nrfConnect you can send commands to the module and receive them back from the serial port connected to your computer. At the simplest transport layer, these things work well. My problem is probably due to poor planning. I wanted to perform a proximity-based action where the BLE module would detect my iPhone or Apple Watch and then perform an action when I enter and exit proximity. I've done this on other devices, but the problem here is getting the module to see the MAC address of my target devices. It turns out that when it comes to an iOS app, BLE is the right choice, but when it comes to proximity or presence, classic BT is probably the answer. So for now I ordered the HM-05 to test this theory. There's literally no pairing required, just a scan to see if a given device is nearby or not, so Apple's stupid Bluetooth policies are likely to be bypassed. In any case, first find out whether everything was done correctly. Otherwise, you'll have it on hand for your next project, just like me.