Thread: Bluetooth Serial Port Nightmare, IOGEAR, Zoom

Hello,

While this might not be the ideal place to ask help for this problem, I figured a lot of people here have alot of computer experience and this is a mobile computer situation of sorts.

Okay, here is the situation. My laptop does not have a serial port. However, I have a few products mounted in my car that do have serial ports. In the past, I dragged out the 20' serial extension and used my desktop pc to communicate with the mobile mounted products.

However, I use my laptop more than my pc and wanted to use it to communicate with the car's devices. Since it's a new laptop, it doesn't have a serial port. I was going to just buy a Usb serial device, but then that's more cables... So I found an IOGEAR bluetooth to serial device.

Reasonable on the price so I bought it.

When I got it, I could not get the bluetooth (zoom usb gizmo) to communicate via bluetooth to the IOGEAR. It found it, but after inputting the passcode, we'd get "detection of service failed." After calling their tech support, I was told to "reset the IOGEAR device." We did this by plugging it into a old computer with a serial port and running hyperterm. It brings up a menu, you select reset, and quit. When I went back to the laptop, it found the device, I entered the passcode and bingo, we got a connection! I thought I was done. Not so fast. When I plugged in the serial port to the device in the car, the software for the device would not work. Now in this case, I had never used the software on the laptop, so I could not say for sure that it worked with the cable. I did get a good bluetooth connection and I use this bluetooth device to pair up to my phone and use it for internet in a pinch. So that part works.

So I decided to hook it to the desktop, because I knew for sure the desktop did work, albeit with the a cable. So I used the same bluetooth device and plug it into my PC's usb hub. It finds the device, but upon discovery and entering of the passcode, I get the same "detection of service failed." Ahah, I think, I know how to fix this. So I plug it into the serial port on the desktop and run hyperterm. But on this computer it doesn't find it. I tried everything. baud, parity, stop bits, control, etc. I even checked the irq for every device, all are good. no conflicts. If I plug in the cable and the device in the car, it works. I even did the loopback test shorting pins 2 and 3 and I can see keys typed in hyperterminal via the serial port. So I know the serial port on the PC is working. And like I said, if I plug them into the cable, all it good.

So on the laptop, I get good bluetooth connection, but for some reason I can't get the software to get thru to the device via the bluetooth/serial device. On the PC, I know the serial port works, but I can't talk to the IOGEAR device to reset it via hyperterm.

In both computers, the serial port is com1. All are set the same, 115K baud, 8N1. I've tried all the different settings and it doesn't make any difference. The bluethooth devices is a class 2 zoom and the IOGear device is a GBS301, which is also class 2.

So does anyone have any insight into this problem? Am I overlooking something?