The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE!
The Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit is the Adafruit take on an ‘all-in-one’ Arduino-compatible + Bluetooth Low Energy board with built in USB and battery charging. It’s an Adafruit Feather 32u4 with a BTLE module, ready to rock! We have many boards in the Feather family, check’em out here.
Bluetooth Low Energy is the hottest new low-power, 2.4GHz spectrum wireless protocol. In particular, it’s the only wireless protocol that you can use with iOS without needing special certification and it’s supported by all modern smartphones. This makes it excellent for use in portable projects that will make use of an iOS or Android phone or tablet. It also is supported in Mac OS X and Windows 8+.
At the Feather 32u4’s heart is at ATmega32u4 clocked at 8 MHz and at 3.3V logic, a chip setup we’ve had tons of experience with as it’s the same as the Flora. This chip has 32K of flash and 2K of RAM, with built in USB so not only does it have a USB-to-Serial program & debug capability built in with no need for an FTDI-like chip, it can also act like a mouse, keyboard, USB MIDI device, etc.
Use the Bluefruit App to get your project started
Using our Bluefruit iOS App or Android App, you can quickly get your project prototyped by using your iOS or Android phone/tablet as a controller. We have a color picker, quaternion/accelerometer/gyro/magnetometer or location (GPS), and an 8-button control game pad. This data can be read over BLE and piped into the ATmega32u4 chip for processing & control
You can do a lot more too!
- The Bluefruit can also act like an HID Keyboard (for devices that support BLE HID)
- Can become a BLE Heart Rate Monitor (a standard profile for BLE) – you just need to add the pulse-detection circuitry
- Turn it into a UriBeacon, the Google standard for Bluetooth LE beacons. Just power it and the ‘Friend will bleep out a URL to any nearby devices with the UriBeacon app installed.
Learn Guide
The Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluetooth LE Guide provides all the details and use examples.