Using BT-210/410 with Portenta H7

If you plan to use BT-210/410 with the Portenta H7, you will need to buy the Portenta Breakout Board also, and hook them up to Serial3. Do not use Serial2 - Arduino has known that Serial2 does not work properly since April 2021, but does not seem to care to fix this problem.

The Portenta Core does support the Class UART which seems to allow hooking up UART capabilities to any set of Digital Pins, but I had not been able to make that option to work at all.

Once a BT-210 is hooked up to Portenta Breakout’s Serial3, you can apply RC-100 protocol to it and then can use TASK 2’s Virtual Task Output Monitor to communicate to Portenta H7

Good news!

After the original post, I wanted to read more about the Portenta Break Out Board and I happened to find this Arduino Document:

On Pages 1 and 13, I have noticed that D4 is mapped to USART6_RX, and D5 is mapped to USART6_TX, so I connected my BT-210 (RX) to D5 and my BT-210 (TX) to D4.

On the software side, see line 21 of my sketch using the UART class to define my UART Port named RC100. Then I can hook up TASK2 Virtual TASK Output Monitor to get the result shown below:

I wished that I had figured all this out before I bought the Portenta Break Out Board :frowning_face:

At least, now some of you can save some money NOT BUYING the Portenta Breakout Port - if you only need to find an Open UART Port on the Portenta H7 to use a BT-210/410. :grinning: