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Feather is the new development board from Adafruit, and like its namesake it is thin, light, and lets you fly! Adafruit designed Feather to be a new standard for portable microcontroller cores.
This is the Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit - Adafruits take on an 'all-in-one' Arduino-compatible + Bluetooth Low Energy with built in USB and battery charging.
Bluetooth Low Energy is the hottest new low-power, 2.4GHz spectrum wireless protocol. In particular, its the only wireless protocol that you can use with iOS without needing special certification and it's supported by all modern smart phones. This makes it excellent for use in portable projects that will make use of an iOS or Android phone or tablet. It also is supported in Mac OS X and Windows 8+.
At the Feather 32u4's heart is at ATmega32u4 clocked at 8 MHz and at 3.3V logic. This chip has 32K of flash and 2K of RAM, with built in USB so not only does it have a USB-to-Serial program & debug capability built in with no need for an FTDI-like chip, it can also act like a mouse, keyboard, USB MIDI device, etc.
To make it easy to use for portable projects, Adafruit added a connector for any 3.7V Lithium polymer batteries and built in battery charging. You don't need a battery, it will run just fine straight from the micro USB connector. But, if you do have a battery, you can take it on the go, then plug in the USB to recharge. The Feather will automatically switch over to USB power when its available. Adafruit also tied the battery through a divider to an analog pin, so you can measure and monitor the battery voltage to detect when you need a recharge.
Features:
- Measures 2.0" x 0.9" x 0.28" (51mm x 23mm x 8mm) without headers soldered in
- Light as a (large?) feather - 5.7 grams
- ATmega32u4 @ 8MHz with 3.3V logic/power
- 3.3V regulator with 500mA peak current output
- USB native support, comes with USB bootloader and serial port debugging
- You also get tons of pins - 20 GPIO pins
- Hardware Serial, hardware I2C, hardware SPI support
- 7 x PWM pins
- 10 x analog inputs
- Built in 100mA lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED
- Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking
- Power/enable pin
- 4 mounting holes
- Reset button
The Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE uses the extra space left over to add our excellent Bluefruit BTLE module + two status indicator LEDs.
The Bluefruit LE module is an nRF51822 chipset from Nordic, programmed with multi-function code that 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.
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