OK weird.

I got the new isolated power supply and hooked it up and tried it out.

It seemed to work but it made a faint humming/whining noise during operation. Not noise in the audio chain, but I mean physical noise when I put me ear up next to it. I've heard power supplies that whine a bit before, so I thought maybe this was normal operation and kept trying it out.

The ground loop noise on the bluetooth/arduino/empeg assembly audio chain was even less than with previous power supplies. Not 100 percent gone, but definitely much much better. Prior versions of the noise were a combinaion of an electronic hum as well as a rushing-wind kind of static noise floor, but with the new power supply it was only the static noise floor, and that was pretty quiet.

Unfortunately I noticed that the bluetooth and arduino were a bit unstable, as if maybe it wasn't supplying the right voltage. Example of what I mean by "unstable" is that the bluetooth connection would drop occasionally, or the reset button that I implemented on the arduino would not function sometimes.

So I unplugged the new power supply and went back to the pololu power supply. And then I plugged in my USB debug cable into the Arudino to work on the programming side of things and... nothing. Nothing comes out on the debug cable.

What's interesting is that things go IN on the debug cable just fine. And the communication between the arduino and the bluetooth board are fine. I know this because of the behaviors I have programmed into my code. I can press the reset button and my blue LED connected to the arduino lights up and it erases the bluetooth pairing on the bluetooth chip, exactly as it is supposed to. I can do all the actions that I normally can do and they all work. I just don't see their output logs on my arduino serial debug monitor any more.

I can SEND commands to the bluetooth module by typing them into the arduino debug console and they get there, they arrive and do the correct thing. For instance if I type BOOT 0 into the arudino debug console then the bluetooth chip correctly reboots (it disconnects form whatever it was paired with and then reconnects after a moment). So SENDING text to the Arduino works.

But I don't see any serial ooutput coming BACK from the arudino. And I know that my program outputs stuff back (regardless of echo on or echo off), it's got specific logging commands that my program has said to put there, and those commands are in there pretty constantly from power-on. For instance, I can press my reset button and my blue LED lights up to indicate it's in paring mode, and I know at that moment I'm echoing a bunch of messages to the arduino debug serial port, but I'm not seeing them on the console.

I tried reloading a program onto the arduino, it times out because it can't get a serial signal back saying that it is receiving the code.

I tried fully unplugging the arduino from the entire assembly and connecting it solely to the computer just from the USB cable. Same thing.

I tried plugging it into an entirely different computer and different operating system (going from Mac to Windows), which entailed installing the arudino development software and device drivers from scratch on the new computer, same thing.

It's not a baud rate thing, because (a) the program sets the baud rate and I know the program is working, and (b) I tried different baud rates on the monitor anyway. Same thing.

Wow this is weird. I don't see how the new power supply could have done this to the arduino but I suppose it could? I don't know. Why would it fry only one direction of the arduino serial port while the rest of the thing works perfectly for everything else? Weird.