Post
by cvoinescu » Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:21 pm
You are looking at it the wrong way, I'm afraid. Here's why.
There are two kinds of USB ports: host, and device (and a rare few that can do both, usually found on smartphones and cameras). Hosts typically have female A connectors. Devices have either female B connectors (e.g. external hard drive, Arduino Uno), male A connectors on permanently attached cables (e.g. mouse, joystick), or male A connectors as part of the (small) device itself (e.g. thumb drive, Bluetooth adapter). There are three sizes of each type of connector (regular, mini and micro, for a total of 12* different connectors), but this does not change the logic. The difference between host and device is not just the shape of the connector; the host requires much more "smarts" than a device, which is why the host needs to be a reasonably powerful computer (Arduino Uno and the Carbide Motion board do not qualify).
The Bluetooth USB adapters are devices, and they're designed to work in host ports. They're useful only if your computer doesn't already have a Bluetooth interface (practically all laptops have one, but few desktops do). On the Arduino or Carbide Motion board, you need to use a "serial Bluetooth module". This is designed to have a very simple interface, but, unfortunately, it's not a USB host, so you can't plug the Arduino or Carbide Motion into it. With an Arduino Uno, it's a simple matter of connecting four wires to get the Bluetooth module to work (ground, power, serial transmit, serial receive). With the Carbide Motion board, I don't know -- there is a connector, but how it's wired I don't know.
* In the interest of completeness, the mini-A connectors (male and female) have been rarely used and they're now deprecated, and the female micro connector also comes in a host-and-device variety (inexplicably named "on-the-go") which accepts both A and B male connectors. Your smartphone or digital camera may have one of those. So that's 11 kinds, not counting USB 3.0 (a whole new set of connectors) and USB-and-eSATA multifunction connectors. Not quite Heinz-level variety, but getting there.
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