Lightweight board delivers efficient BLE and Arduino compatibility for wearables

Mouser now stocks the Feather nRF52 Bluefruit from Adafruit. The board, part of the company’s Feather line of standalone and stackable development boards, is a complete Arduino-compatible, Bluetooth low energy development board with built-in USB and battery charging. Using the powerful onboard Nordic SoC, engineers and makers can run code directly on the board without requiring an external microcontroller, which improves performance and power consumption for a variety IoT, wearables, lighting, MIDI audio, and other applications. The device improves on previous nRF51-based Bluefruit modules with double the flash memory, SRAM, and performance plus native support for the Arduino IDE. The Feather incorporates a Nordic nRF52 SoC, which is built around a 32-bit Arm Cortex M4F processor with 512kb of flash and 64kb of RAM. The SoC’s embedded 2.4GHz transceiver offers transmit power up to 4dBm and receiver sensitivity of -96dBm in Bluetooth low energy mode. The board offers a range of peripherals, including 19 GPIOs, eight analog inputs, and three 4-output PWM modules. A built-in USB-to-serial converter enables quick programming and debugging, and a standard lithium polymer battery connector provides onboard USB-based battery charging. True to its name, the 51mm × 23mm × 8mm board weighs just 5.7g without headers and works with almost any FeatherWings board that doesn’t require UART.