Adding Bluetooth to your Shooting Chrony

Tom Opgenorth
Programming

If you’re into reloading, you know about chronographs. Odds are you might have a Shooting Chrony. I myself happen to own a Shooting Chrony Beta Master. These are pretty well made devices, and Shooting Chrony has a no nonsense replacement policy.

The only way to interact with the device is via a proprietary 9-pin-female RS-232 cable, like an old modem. Now, this techique was all the rage circa 1994 when dial-up internet was king and everybody had PC’s with two or more serial ports. This is really sub-par when you want to try and connect your smartphone to a Shooting Chrony (yes, this is possible, but more on this later).

There is a simple, albeit expensive, to “upgrade” to Bluetooth with three easy-to-use parts:

  1. Order the 9-pin-female RS-232 cable from Shooting Chrony. This will cost you $22.95.

  2. Get a Serial Bluetooth adapter. I’m sure that there are others out there, but this is the one I got. It’s $59.00, and it is pretty full featured. It does require an external power source to work. In my case I have it plugged into a micro-USB cable. It also has the pins for you to wire up a 9 volt battery.

  3. Now both the Serial Bluetooth adapter and the 9-pin RS-232 cable have female connectors, so make sure to get yourself a 9-pin RS-232 gender bender as well.

Piece all of these together, and you get something like this:

The total cost of this contraption was about $90.00 all total (including the RS-232 gender bender and shipping). This is a bit expensive, but now with this out of the way I could focus on writing some software to download the results to my Android phone.