I finally loaded the software onto the Adafruit Bluefruit LE board after 2 weeks of having it breadboarded but being, essentially, afraid to do so.
It loaded with no errors, all libraries included. The Bluetooth part worked perfectly! My android phone picked it up, recognized it as a hardware keyboard, and had a few questions for me such as “what language was the keyboard” and “do you want to display the virtual keyboard?”
I was not, however, able to send any keystrokes to the phone, and tried many iterations of this. A flash of intuition told me that I had my switches installed 90° away from what they should be, and a trip to Adafruit to find the schematic confirmed it. Still, no joy.
After getting my new, cheapo multimeter found & going (you need a Phillips head screwdriver to the battery in) I used continuity mode to determine that the damn switches don’t work! That actually made me pretty happy because it was either that or issues that were much worse.
I’m sure I have enough switches in the basement to make a quick wired key layout for breadboard testing so I don’t have to get into using the real cherry key switches reserved for the final build.
This feels right and I should be into final prototyping soon! I will take a win.