Development board offers easy development and faster prototyping of Bluetooth LE and NFC applications

Bluey, development board

The open source ‘Bluey’ development board offers a range of sensors, power options, and features a built-in NFC antenna, and is designed for users with limited RF design expertise

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that Indian electronics hardware developer, Electronut Labs, has selected Nordic’s award-winning nRF52832 Bluetooth® Low Energy System-on-Chip (SoC) for its ‘Bluey’ development board. The open-source development board is targeted at the hobbyists and makers with limited RF experience.

The development board offers a built-in accelerometer/gyroscope, as well as temperature, humidity, and ambient light sensors, and provides flexible power options via a built-in CR2032 coin cell battery holder, as well as pins for an external battery, and a micro USB connector that can be used for power and/or Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) debugging. Bluey also features a micro SD slot for data logging projects. The built-in sensors enable amateur engineers to build practical IoT projects quickly.

The development includes a built-in NFC antenna making it simple for users to take advantage of the nRF52832 SoC’s LE SoC combines a 64MHz, 32-bit ARM® Cortex® M4F microprocessor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF software) featuring -96dB RX sensitivity, with 512kB Flash memory and 64kB RAM.
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Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC was the obvious choice for the Bluey development board because of the powerful microprocessor, low power consumption, and built-in NFC support.
Mahesh Venkitachalam, Electronut Lab

The SoC is supplied with Nordic’s S132 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 4.2 qualified RF software protocol stack for building advanced Bluetooth LE applications. The S132 SoftDevice Central, Peripheral, Broadcaster and Observer Bluetooth LE roles, supports up to twenty connections, and enables concurrent role operation.

“Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC was the obvious choice for the Bluey development board because of the powerful microprocessor, low power consumption, and built-in NFC support,” says Mahesh Venkitachalam, Founder, Electronut Labs.

“Nordic’s excellent Software Development Kit [SDK] and their support for the ARM GCC [GNU Compiler Collection] compiler allows for quick, low cost firmware development. Furthermore, Nordic’s reference designs simplify RF design for non-expert engineers. Also, the Nordic Devzone is a great place to get project-related assistance from both the developer community as well as Nordic’s always helpful employees.”