[T] - Feather M0 BlueFuit LE

A M0 microcontroler with a BLE Bluetooth module

The Feather is a new development platform produced by Adafruit and as its name suggests, Feather is small and light! Adafruit designed the Feather as a new standard for portable microcontroller projects.

Here is the Feather M0 Bluefruit LE (Bluetooth Low Energy) from Adafruit which offers you an Arduino Compatible platform + Bluetooth Low Energy + USB support + battery charger ... in short "All-in-one" ready to use.
This board is a Feather M0 equipped with a BTLE module! We have other boards from the Feather family, see our range here!

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of the latest new low energy products in the 2.4GHz spectrum (the one used for wireless connections). BLE is the only protocol that can be used with iOS without the need for a special certification ... BLE is supported by all modern smart phones. In short, BLE is excellent for use in portable projects using iOS or Android phones and tablets. BLE is also supported by Mac OS X and Windows 8+ (dixit Adafruit).

At the heart of this Feather M0 board, we find an ARM Cortex M0 ATSAMD21G18 processor clocked at 48 MHz and operating in 3.3V logic, the same as that used in the new Arduino Zero. This processor has 256K of FLASH (8x more than on an Atmega328 or 32u4) and 32K of RAM (16x more)! The ATSAMD21G18 integrates USB support, it is not necessary to have an FTDI chip to ensure the USB-to-Serial functionalities & debugging functionalities.

To make it even easier to use in your portable projects, Adafruit has added a connector to connect a 3.7V Lithium polymer battery, battery whose charge will be taken care of by the battery recharging electronics (battery which is recharged when the Feather is plugged into the USB port). The Feather automatically selects the power source (between USB and battery) giving preference to USB if it is connected. The battery is also connected to an analog pin via a voltage divider bridge, so you can monitor the battery voltage and inform the user when it is necessary to recharge it.

Here are some specifications, identical to all Feathers M0:

• Dimensions: 51mm x 23mm x 8mm (without connector welded on the board)
• Light as a feather:  4.6 grams
• ATSAMD21G18 @ 48MHz with 3.3V power supply and logic
• 256KB of FLASH + 32KB of RAM
• No EEPROM
• Crystal at 32.768 KHz for clock signal and RTC generation
• 3.3V regulator with peak at 500mA (max output current in peak)
• Native USB support, delivered with a USB bootloader and serial debugging
• You have a ton of pins - 20 GPIO pins
• Hardware Serial Port, Hardware I2C Port, Hardware SPI Port
• PWM output on all pins
• 6 x 12-bit analog input (max value = 4095)
  
  • 6-channel ADC with 12-bit resolution (value from 0 to 4096)
  • Default resolution fixed at 10bits (value from 0 to 1024) for compatibility with Arduino Uno. Resolution reconfigurable using analogReadResolution()
• Analog output: 1. 1-channel DAC with 10-bit resolution (value from 0 to 1024)
• 1 x 10-bit analog output (DAC, max value = 1023)
• Includes a LipolY 100mA charger with indicator LED (charge status)
• Red LED on pin # 13 (which you can control yourself)
• Power/enable pin
• 4 mounting holes
• Reset button

The Feather M0 Bluefruit LE uses the space that was available on the Feather M0 Basic to add the excellent Bluefruit BTLE module + two indicator LEDs.

About the Bluefruit LE module

The Bluefruit LE module is an nRF51822 chipset produced by Nordic and programmed with a multi-function code that can perform many tasks! Most people will be happy to use the standard UART RX/TX connection profile offered by Nordic. In this profile, the Bluefruit acts as a tunnel which transmits the data in a 'transparent' way to (or from) your iOS or Android devices. You can use the iOS App or Android App, written by Adafruit or write your own app to communicate with UART services.

The board is capable of doing much more than sending character chains in the air! With an easy-to-learn AT command set, you can get complete control over device behavior, also including the ability to define and manipulate your own GATT Services and Features. With AT commands, you can change the way the device advertises to other Bluetooth Low Energy devices or get the temperature of the chip, battery voltage, check the RSSI connection or MAC address, and much more. A list far too long to list all the points here!

Use the Bluefruit App to quickly start your project

Using the Adafruit Bluefruit App for iOS or for Android, you can quickly and easily prototype your projects using an iOS or Android controller for phone and tablet. The app offers a color picker, quaternion/accelerometer/gyro/magnetometer or location (GPS), as well as 8 buttons under a game pad controller. This data can be read via the BLE tunnel to be processed by the ATmega32u4 (or M0) microcontroller for processing and control.

You can also do much more!

• The Bluefruit can also pretend to be a HID keyboard (for peripherals that support BLE HID)
• Can become a Heart Rate BLE monitor (a standard profile for BLE) - you will just need to add a pulse detection circuit.
• Transform it into UriBeacon, the Google standard for Bluetooth LE beacons. Turn on the power and the Friend will send the URL to any neighboring peripheral with the UriBeacon application installed.
• Incorporates an over-the-air bootloading feature which keeps the module up to date with the latest firmware version. Use any Android device or iOS device to get the update and install it. This will do a native update of the code on the BLE module to add new wireless functionalities, this doesn't reprogram the microcontroller of the Feather board (only the BLE module).

Delivered fully assembled and tested, with a USB bootloader, which allows you to easily use the module with Arduino IDE. Also includes a connector/pinHeader section that you can weld to connect the module to a breadboard. Lipoly battery, MicroUSB cable and other elements not included. For each order, you will only receive the Feather M0 Bluefruit LE module.

Datasheet

• MDBT datasheet
• 51.2mm x 22.8mm x 8mm
• Weight: 5.7g
• Datasheet - pinout
• Raytac Corporation Bluetooth module
• FCC ID: SH6MDBT40