BLE Smurfs – Write once, deploy anywhere

We are always exploring ways to make things easier. We would like to introduce the BLE Smurfs to you, which helps developing long battery life devices with Bluetooth Low Energy.

The BLE Smurfs is a Bluetooth Low Energy development board is designed with low energy consumption technology and small size in shape.

Based on  Modular design in  hardware, we divide into two parts – CMSIS DAP interface part and BLE part. Each of the modules features a useful functionality to make it powerful while combining them together. After the developing, you can easily break this board into two part, one for programming, the other one can be deployed into small size enclosure.

It’s integrated with current measurement feature, providing real time energy consumption data, amazing!  Now developers can able to optimize software to create long battery life hardwares.

It supports ARM mbed cloud-based IDE with an handy C/C++ SDK and a large number of open source libraries, which makes prototyping and development extremely easy.

Part 1: CMSIS DAP Interface

The CMSIS DAP interface is very powerful by providing following features:

• Drag-n-drop programming
• CMSIS DAP debug
• USB Virtual serial port
• Current measurement
• Battery charging

interface The interface can be also used to program and debug other ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers through SWD interface.

To enable the current measurement feature, just set the baud rate of the USB virtual serial port to 4000000+, then the current data of the BLE part will be sent through the virtual serial port.

Part 2: BLE Module

• Nordic nRF51822 with BLE and ARM Cortex M0
• MPU6050, 3d accelerometer and 3d gyroscope
• RGB LED
• Battery Connector & Battery Voltage Measurement
• all 4 I/Os can be used as analog input, digital input/output, i2c, spi or uart

The BLE part is built on the Nordic nRF51822 with Bluetooth Low Energy 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio and a 32 bit ARM Cortex-M0 core running 16MHz. MPU6050, a 6 DOF with 3D accelerometer and 3D gyroscope, is integrated to provide motion detect feature.

MOR: DMP

The Digital Motion Processor (DMP) of the MPU6050 provide several features (such as gesture detect, pedometer, calibrating gyro data) which can reduce running time of the nRF51822 to get a long battery life. It also integrates battery connector and battery voltage measurement circuit for you.

Feature: OTA

We custom a bootloader for the BLE Smurfs to enable Firmware-Over-The-Air feature. When the BLE Smurfs is divided into two parts, we can still update the firmware of the nRF51822 through Firmware Over-the-Air (FOTA).

Feature: Software & Tool

To make current data easy to use, we create a cross platform tool – BLE Smurfs Monitor to make it visual. Get it from:

• BLE Smurfs Monitor for Windows
• BLE Smurfs Monitor for Linux/Mac OS, dependency: pyqtgraph, pyside

The BLE Smurfs will come soon. Stay tuned!

About Author