I want to make my own Bluetooth enabled accessory. Do you guys know where I can get the Bluetooth transmitter/receiver so I can program it to do what I want? Google returned things like Bluetooth headsets and stuff, which is not what I need.

What do you want to make? There are tons of embedded platforms with built in bluetooth. Gumstix and the brand new Pandaboard come to mind. On your computer you'll need bluetooth for testing (if you don't have an internal card you'll need a dongle. They're very tiny).

So yeah answer these two questions:
1) What did you want to make? (It'll answer how powerful of a chip you need. For instance a Cortex A9 like in a Pandaboard is a "single-board computer" powerful enough to run Ubuntu and other operating systems).
2) How big of a device did you want to make? There is a huge size difference in devices.

Quote: Original post by Sirisian
What do you want to make? There are tons of embedded platforms with built in bluetooth. Gumstix and the brand new Pandaboard come to mind. On your computer you'll need bluetooth for testing (if you don't have an internal card you'll need a dongle. They're very tiny).

So yeah answer these two questions:
1) What did you want to make? (It'll answer how powerful of a chip you need. For instance a Cortex A9 like in a Pandaboard is a "single-board computer" powerful enough to run Ubuntu and other operating systems).
2) How big of a device did you want to make? There is a huge size difference in devices.

Oh, I just want to make simple light switch controlled by a bluetooth app. I want to have a lightbulb attached to it, and see if I can turn it on and off remotely from the app. So I guess the chip itself shouldn't be too big.

How complicated is this really? I managed to find a few vendors online, but I don't think I realized how many different types of bluetooth chips out there.

Your requirements would probably be a chip with bluetooth and at least one output pin to use with a transistor to act as a switch. You'd need the processing power to read in the messages send from your computer and the ability to set a pin. Then again I'm not really a hardware person. (Might try talking to the people in #electronics on irc.freenode.net).

Gumstix and most single board computers might be too expensive for this project though. I haven't researched it much, but I assume there must be a small bluetooth only board with a simple programmable circuit.

Sparkfun has some bluetooth stuff which may be applicable.