Adafruit Bluefruit LE Shield

by lady ada

published October 09, 2015, last updated March 08, 2024

posted in Adafruit Products

Save Download

Beginner

Project guide

Overview

Would you like to add powerful and easy-to-use Bluetooth Low Energy to your robot, art or other electronics project? Heck yeah! With BLE now included in modern smart phones and tablets, its fun to add wireless connectivity. So what you really need is the new Adafruit Bluefruit LE Shield for Arduino!

The Bluefruit LE Shield makes it easy to add Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to your Arduino or compatible. Solder in the included headers and plug right in. It connects to your Arduino or other microcontroller using the hardware SPI interface (MISO, MOSI, SCK) plus a chip select line (default D8), interrupt line (default D7) and reset (default D4). You can rearrange any and all the pins if you'd like, by cutting the jumpers underneath, and soldering jumper wires to your desired pins.

If you want this in non-shield format, check out the SPI friend. If you like Serial communication more than SPI, we also have a breakout can talk UART

This multi-function module can do quite a lot! For most people, they'll be very happy to use the standard Nordic UART RX/TX profile. In this profile, the Bluefruit acts as a data pipe, that can 'transparently' transmit back and forth from your iOS or Android device. You can use our iOS App or Android App to get started sending data from your Arduino to your phone quickly and painlessly.

Why Use Adafruit's Module?

There are plenty of BLE modules out there, with varying quality on the HW design as well as the firmware.

One of the biggest advantages of the Adafruit Bluefruit LE family is that we wrote all of the firmware running on the devices ourselves from scratch.

We control every line of code that runs on our modules ... and so we aren't at the mercy of any third party vendors who may or may not be interested in keeping their code up to date or catering to our customer's needs.

Because we control everything about the product, we add features that are important to our customers, can solve any issues that do come up without begging any 3rd parties, and we can even change Bluetooth SoCs entirely if the need ever arises!