Adafruit Bluefruit LE UART Friend – Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Adafruit

Would you like to add powerful and easy-to-use Bluetooth Low Energy to your robot, art or other electronics project? Heck yeah! 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 UART Friend!

The Bluefruit LE UART Friend makes it easy to add Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to anything with a hardware or software serial port. Adafruit even has nice hardware flow control so you won’t have to think about losing data. Connect to your Arduino or other microcontroller or even just a standard FTDI cable for debugging and testing.

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 connection 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 their iOS App or Android App, or write your own to communicate with the UART service.

So it’s a fancy pants Wireless UART Adapter?

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 Adafruit’s Bluefruit iOS App or Android App, you can quickly get your project prototyped by using your iOS or Android phone/tablet as a controller. They 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!

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!

Check out Adafruit’s tutorial for all of the details that you can dream of!

• ARM Cortex M0 core running at 16MHz
• 256KB flash memory
• 32KB SRAM
• Transport: UART @ 9600 baud with HW flow control (CTS+RTS 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
• Dimensions: 21mm x 32mm x 5mm / 0.8″ x 1.26″ x 0.2″
• Weight: 3.4g
• Datasheets, EagleCAD PCB files, and Fritzing object available in the product tutorial