DIY Electronics has started a campaign on Kickstarter for a range of products for bluetooth 5: BLE Module, Nano 2 & Blend 2. Announced in June 2016, the new Bluetooth 5 specification promises significantly increased speeds and broadcast messaging capacity over the current Bluetooth 4.2 standard.
All three products are armed with Bluetooth 5 ready Nordic next generation nRF52832 Bluetooth Low Energy System-on-Chip. The nRF52832 SoC is a powerful, highly flexible ultra-low power multiprotocol SoC ideally suited for Bluetooth low energy (previously called Bluetooth Smart), ANT and 2.4 GHz ultra low-power wireless applications. The nRF52832 BLE SoC combines its ARM processor with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio featuring -96 dB RX sensitivity, 512 kB Flash memory, 64 kB RAM and NFC-A tag for “Touch-to-Pair” capability.
BLE Module
At the heart of all the new products is the new BLE Module model# MB-N2. It houses the Nordic nRF52832, an on-board antenna and other components special tuning for great performance and low power consumption. The module provides all GPIO pins and supports all advance features offer by Nordic nRF52832. And Kickstarter plans to get this module certified for CE, FCC and Bluetooth.
Nano 2
They launched first BLE Nano in 2014 and their most popular product. Nano 2 is a ‘drop-in’ replacement, with exactly the same form factor, and in most instances no need to change firmware code. In addition, the new development board also offers a U.FL connector for an external NFC antenna, while users will benefit from the extra processing power and hardware resources of the nRF52832 SoC.
Blend 2
Blend is very popular as it is a "full-size" Arduino compatible board which supports most shields. It has on board a Cortex-M3 MCU that supports DAPLink, slot for Apple MFi coprocessor and two Grove connectors. You should choose Blend 2 if you want to test all GPIOs and functions available on the Nordic nRF52832.
Prgramming options
These boards supports all popular programming platforms including Nordic nRF5 SDK, Arduino, mbed, JavaScript, Phython and Apache Mynewt.
Click here to view the Kickstarter Campaign.
