Adafruit Bluefruit LE SPI Friend – Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 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 SPI Friend!

The Bluefruit LE SPI Friend makes it easy to add Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to anything with 4 or 5 GPIO pins. With SPI, you don’t have to worry about baud rates, flow control, or giving up a hardware UART port. Connect to your Arduino or other microcontroller using the common four-pin SPI interface (MISO, MOSI, SCK and CS) plus a 5th GPIO pin for interrupts (to let the Arduino know when data or a response is ready).

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 Adafruit’s iOS App or Android App, or write your own to communicate with the UART service.

If you like Serial communication more than SPI, we also have a version that can talk UART

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 they wrote all of the firmware running on the devices from scratch. Adafruit control every line of code that runs on the modules … and so you will not be 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 your needs.

Because Adafruit control everything about the product, they add features that are important to you, can solve any issues that do come up without begging any 3rd parties, and they 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 up to 4MHz clock speed
• 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 tunneled over SPI protocol to get up and running quickly
• 23mm x 26mm x 5mm / 0.9″ x 1″ x 0.2″
• Weight: 3g

Datasheet, firmware files, CAD files, and Fritzing object available in the product tutorial