Featherweight Bluefruit board doubles memory power

Using the powerful onboard Nordic system-on-chip (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 of Internet of Things (IoT), wearables, lighting, MIDI audio, and other applications.

The board improves on previous nRF51-based Bluefruit modules with double the flash memory, SRAM, and performance plus native support for the Arduino integrated development platform (IDE).

The Feather incorporates a Nordic nRF52 SoC, which is built around a 32-bit Arm Cortex M4F processor with 512KBytes of flash and 64KBytes 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 general-purpose inputs and outputs (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 51 × 23 × 8mm board weighs just 5.7grams without headers and works with almost any Adafruit FeatherWings board that doesn’t require UART.