I recently found an application that solves a problem for me, but when I research the parts, one of which is a Wixel, I eventually find myself in this forum.
Great- someplace to ask for help if I run into issues.
But- wait? Only four posts for the whole year?
Does this mean that no one is using Wixel any more? Or is the product so mature that users don’t run into issues? Or is there another product similar to Wixel that users refer? I would not like investing weeks into the learning curve only to find no support or a diminishing user community.
Thank you for your interest in our Wixel controllers. As we indicate on the Wixel product pages, we do not recommend them for new designs:
We can keep making them for a while, and the underlying chip from TI is still available, so the Wixels might make sense for some projects, but this is an old product and newer bluetooth modules are likely to be better (not that we have a specific one to offer or in the works).
Not necessarily. I’ve been using Wixel serial links for my autonomous robots for years, and just recently changed over to an HC-05 BT module for the same role. I use the RF link to, among other things, to stop the robot from running into or over things during testing. Unfortunately there seems to be a 1-3 second delay between typing a character on my PC keyboard and the time the robot responds - a delay that can be disastrous if the robot is about to take a nose-dive off a table or run into something fragile. I don’t know if this is something peculiar to the HC-05 BT module or something inherent in BT comms, but I went back to a Wixel pair.
What I am trying to do is only available on the Wixel, but I can’t get it to compile. I tried using BlueTooth but could never get the data I wanted from the device.
The setup and initialization of the HC-05 BT module can be a bit tricky and counterintuitive, but I have used it with success in several of my projects over the years. The drawbacks that I have found are the general complexity of getting BT to work, and the 1-3 second delay (only a problem for my autonomous robot as I mentioned above.
Take a look at my blog site - ‘fpaynter.com’, and do a search on ‘HC-05’. You’ll find several articles dealing with it, with (I hope) fairly detailed descriptions of the initialization process.
