For many applications, a Bluetooth Adapter used in combination with another Bluetooth product (e.g. Brainboxes’ USB to Serial adapter connected to a PC with Brainboxes’ Bluetooth Software Suite, or a second adapter) essentially replaces the serial cable.

This means freeing the device from the limits imposed by the cable specification and in many applications removes the need for expensive cable installation and maintenance. The devices are designed to appear transparent to a user’s applications that would otherwise be communicating via a COM port and over a cable.

Brainboxes Bluetooth to Serial adapters (BL range) are often used to connect to tablet computers, mobile phones, desktop and laptop computers, barcode scanners and many different types of POS (point-of-sale) applications.

However in order to communicate between one of our BL products and a piece of Bluetooth enabled equipment, the equipment itself must have the appropriate Bluetooth v1.1 support and also support the Serial Port Profile (SPP).

Our BL range is qualified to work using Bluetooth v1.1. This particular version was one of the earliest to be released.

At this moment in time, the latest Bluetooth qualification available is 4.2. Therefore the majority of Bluetooth products released today will support the latest qualification.
In order for Bluetooth products to be compatible with our BL range, they must either be qualified as Bluetooth v1.1 devices, or if they are a newer version, have backwards compatibility to Bluetooth v1.1.

The Serial Port Profile (often referred to as SPP) is based on the ETSI 07.10 and RFCOMM protocols. It was designed to be an RS-232 serial cable substitute, which is also what the BL range is designed for.
It is an absolute requirement that the Bluetooth equipment which the user intends to communicate with one of our BL products has SPP support, otherwise communications will not work.

This of course only applies when the user is connecting one of our BL adapters directly to the Bluetooth port of their equipment. If they are using a BL-875 for example and the two adapters are connected to RS-232 serial ports on their hardware; SPP and the Bluetooth v1.1 qualification does not need to be taken in to account as the BL-875 adapters are paired together and will work as normal.