The wireless board project had the goal to provide Interaction Designers with an add-on to the wiring board by Hernando Barragan that could support wireless communication. We chose to focus in using Bluetooth devices for this purpose after making an exhaustive search among other technical possibilities. The original project brief spoke about working with peer-to-peer communication among boards. Even though that is an interesting possibility at the moment of realization of the project, the state of the art of technology would allow us only to concentrate in emulating such case (peer-to-peer) by using a computer as a communication central

This way of using the system makes it easier for the students to work with it in the sense that we avoid the fuzz of having to control communication directly from the wiring board. In the future it would be interesting to study the use of the forthcoming Bluetooth technology, which we expect will make it easier to make serial communication over Bluetooth chipsets

The following diagram shows how our solution works. We have chosen to use a very cheap Bluetooth module from the manufacturer Globalsat. This allows us to use the Bluetooth link as if it was the normal USB cable. The advantage is that we can have access to several boards at the same time from one single computer. Usually Bluetooth dongles can handle up to seven simultaneous communication channels. This means that in a typical configuration we could have seven wiring boards communicating to each other through one single computer

Figure 1: four wiring boards connected to the same computer, one of them through the USB wire, the other three wirelessly, when data comes in through the link labelled as "1" it goes out through all the other lines, including itself