We are a high school robotics team and we use mindstorms NXT robots to train C++ (see www.firstplusplus.com). In the final lessons we use processing.org to send gamepad commands (using the procontroll library) to the NXT over Bluetooth using simple serial library calls.
We use Microsoft Windows 7, and have tried many versions of processing. (Not that it matters for this discussion, but we use NXTOSEK to program C++ on the NXT.)
We have had issues connecting to the NXT with the serial connection on processing from Day 1. The first main issue was that the serial library only found the incoming Bluetooth COM port for the NXT (where the NXT would be the master and the PC the slave) not the outgoing COM port (where the PC is the master). We changed the programming for the NXT to be the master and the PC the slave to work around this issue, and that helped somewhat but the setup was still having Bluetooth connection issues about 50% of the time.
After a lot of debugging, we found that it was taking from 1 to 5 minutes for the PC's Bluetooth to connect with the NXT, and by then something would have timed out and we have to start over trying to get the devices to connect.
We replaced the rxtxserial.dll with the one from the arduino forum at this location on the PC:
processing-2.0.1\modes\java\libraries\serial\library\windows32
Note, this is a Microsoft Windows OS specific work around.
It was like magic. It now connects in a fraction of a second and works as dreamed.
If you are having Bluetooth issues with processing on a Microsoft OS, it might be worth a try to swap out the rxtxserial.dll. It's an easy fix to try.
