Monday 19 March 2012

Wireless sensor node - enclosure mark 2 (follow up) (14)

At the end of my last post I had packed all of the components of my base station into an enclosure and had everyone working. Almost.

The one issue I found was that whenever I was connected to the base station over Bluetooth, the base station was unable to receive temperature readings over the 315MHz RF link.

This is what the setup looked like when it didn't work.


In the end I posted to the Arduino forums and spoke to some friends about the issue and concluded that the Bluetooth RF must be interfering with the actual circuitry of the 315MHz RF receiver. My first idea was to try and setup some kind of electromagnetic shielding around the 315MHz RF receiver module. However, before I began working on this I decided to try simply moving the Bluetooth module further away from the 315MHz RX module.


And now it works! The extra ~5cm of distance is enough to avoid whatever interference was previously taking place.