Adafruit Bluefruit LE Shield – Bluetooth LE for Arduino Adafruit

Add powerful and easy-to-use Bluetooth Low Energy to your robot, art or other electronics project? With BLE now included in modern smart phones and tablets, its fun to add wireless connectivity. So what you really need is the new Adafruit Bluefruit LE Shield for Arduino!

The Bluefruit LE Shield makes it easy to add Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to your Arduino or compatible.  Solder in the included headers and plug right in. It connects to your Arduino or other microcontroller using the hardware SPI interface (MISO, MOSI, SCK) plus a chip select line (default D8), interrupt line (default D7) and reset (default D4). You can rearrange any and all the pins if you’d like, by cutting the jumpers underneath, and soldering jumper wires to your desired pins.

If you want this in non-shield format, check out the SPI friend. If you like Serial communication more than SPI, we also have a breakout can talk UART.

This multi-function module can do quite a lot! For most people, they’ll be very happy to use the standard Nordic UART RX/TX profile. In this profile, the Bluefruit acts as a data pipe, that can ‘transparently’ transmit back and forth from your iOS or Android device. You can use our iOS App or Android App to get started sending data from your Arduino to your phone quickly and painlessly.

The board is capable of much more than just sending strings over the air!  Thanks to an easy to learn AT command set, you have full control over how the device behaves, including the ability to define and manipulate your own GATT Services and Characteristics, or change the way that the device advertises itself for other Bluetooth Low Energy devices to see. You can also use the AT commands  to query the die temperature, check the battery voltage, and more, check the connection RSSI or MAC address, and tons more. Really, way too long to list here!

Download Adafruit’s free Android/iOS app and you’re ready to rock!

Using the 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.

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.
• Built in over-the-air bootloading capability so we can keep you updated with the hottest new firmware. Use any Android or iOS device to get updates and install them!

Comes as a fully assembled shield with headers, solder them on and you’re ready to rock. Check out our tutorial for all the details, software, schematics, and more.

Why use Adafruit’s Module?

There are plenty of BLE modules out there, with varying quality on the HW design as well as the firmware. So why should you go with this one?
One of the biggest advantages of the Adafruit Bluefruit LE family is that we wrote all of the firmware running on the devices ourselves from scratch. We control every line of code that runs on our modules … and so we aren’t at the mercy of any third party vendors who may or may not be interested in keeping their code up to date or catering to our customer’s needs.
Because we control everything about the product, we add features that are important to our customers, can solve any issues that do come up without begging any 3rd parties, and we can even change Bluetooth SoCs entirely if the need ever arises!

• ARM Cortex M0 core running at 16MHz
• 256KB flash memory
• 32KB SRAM
• Transport: SPI at 4MHz with HW IRQ (5 pins required)
• 5V-safe inputs (Arduino Uno friendly, etc.)
• On-board 3.3V voltage regulation
• Bootloader with support for safe OTA firmware updates
• Easy AT command set to get up and running quickly
• Datasheet, schematic, and Fritzing available in the product tutorial

Product Dimensions: 67.1mm x 51.7mm x 10.0mm / 2.6″ x 2.0″ x 0.4″

Product Weight: 15.4g / 0.5oz