Introducing the Adafruit Bluefruit LE UART Friend

by Kevin Townsend

published May 01, 2015, last updated March 08, 2024

posted in Adafruit Products

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Beginner

Project guide

Introduction

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 UART Friend!

The Bluefruit LE UART Friend makes it easy to add Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to anything with a hardware or software serial port. We even have nice hardware flow control so you won't have to think about losing data. Connect to your Arduino or other microcontroller or even just a standard FTDI cable for debugging and testing.

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 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. You can use our iOS App or Android App, or write your own to communicate with the UART service.

So it's a Fancy Pants Wireless UART Adapter?

The board is capable of much more than just sending strings over the air! Thanks to an easy to learn AT command set, you have full control over how the device behaves, including the ability to define and manipulate your own GATT Services and Characteristics, or change the way that the device advertises itself for other Bluetooth Low Energy devices to see. You can also use the AT commands to query the die temperature, check the battery voltage, and more, check the connection RSSI or MAC address, and tons more. Really, way too long to list here!

Download our free Android/iOS app and you're ready to rock!

Using our Bluefruit iOS App or Android App, you can quickly get your project prototyped by using your iOS or Android phone/tablet as a controller. We have a color picker, quaternion/accelerometer/gyro/magnetometer or location (GPS), and an 8-button control game pad.

You can do a lot more too!

The Bluefruit can also act like an HID Keyboard (for devices that support BLE HID)
Can become a BLE Heart Rate Monitor (a standard profile for BLE) - you just need to add the pulse-detection circuitry
Turn it into a UriBeacon, the Google standard for Bluetooth LE beacons. Just power it and the 'Friend will bleep out a URL to any nearby devices with the UriBeacon app installed.
Built in over-the-air bootloading capability so we can keep you updated with the hottest new firmware. Use any Android or iOS device to get updates and install them!

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!