Blend Micro – an Arduino Development Board with BLE

Blend Micro is Red Bear labs’ first integrated developement board, we have “blend”ed Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a single board. It is targeted for makers to develop low power Internet-Of-Things (IoT) projects quickly and easily.

 The micro-controller unit (MCU) is Atmel ATmega32u4 and the BLE chip is Nordic nRF8001. Blend Micro runs as BLE peripheral role only, it allows BLE central role devices to establish connection with. 

Current supported BLE central devices:

iOS 7

• iPhone 4s

• iPhone 5 (all models)

• iPod touch 5

• iPad 3/4/mini/Air

Android 4.3 or above (4.4 recommended for stability) with Bluetooth 4.0 hardware support

• Nexus 4

• Nexus 7

• (please report any other Android devices supported)

Windows 8.1 with built-in Bluetooth 4.0 or USB dongle

Mac OSX 10.9.2 with built-in Bluetooth 4.0 or USB dongle

Linux with BlueZ 5.1 with built-in Bluetooth 4.0 or USB dongle

Features

• First BLE + Arduino board under Arduino AtHeart program

• Works with Nordic Bluetooth Smart SDK for Arduino

• Software development using Arduino IDE

• Over-the-Air download of sketch to Blend Micro (available soon)

• Supported by our free Android App and iOS App

Specification

Documents

• Add-on for Arduino IDE
• Get Nordic nRF8001 SDK for Arduino
• Get RBL nRF8001 Library (added some simple APIs) 
• Download the signed driver here for Windows (includes up to Windows 8 PC)

Find more information on http://redbearlab.com/blendmicro.

Technical details