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 SPI Friend!

The Bluefruit LE SPI Friend makes it easy to add Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to anything with 4 or 5 GPIO pins. With SPI, you don't have to worry about baud rates, flow control, or giving up a hardware UART port. Connect to your Arduino or other microcontroller using the common four-pin SPI interface (MISO, MOSI, SCK and CS) plus a 5th GPIO pin for interrupts (to let the Arduino know when data or a response is ready).

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.

If you like Serial communication more than SPI, we also have a version that can talk UART

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. So why should you go with this one?

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!

Check out our tutorial for all of the details that you can dream of!

For years we've seen all sorts of microcontroller-friendly WiFi modules but none of them were really Adafruit-worthy. Either they were too slow, or too difficult to use, or required signing an NDA, or had limited functionality, or too expensive, or too large. So we shied away from carrying any general purpose microcontroller-friendly WiFi boards.NO LONGER! The CC3000 hits that sweet spot of usability, price and capability. It uses SPI for communication (not UART!) so you can push data as fast as you want or as slow as you want. It has a proper interrupt system with IRQ pin so you can have asynchronous connections. It supports 802.11b/g, open/WEP/WPA/WPA2 security, TKIP & AES. A built in TCP/IP stack with a "BSD socket" interface. TCP and UDP in both client and server mode, up to 4 concurrent sockets. It does not support "AP" mode, it can connect to an access point but it cannot be an access point.

New! As of 3/20/2014 we are shipping v1.1 which adds a tri-state buffer to the MISO pin so that you can use the CC3000 with other SPI devices on the same bus.

We wrapped this little silver modules in a tidy breakout board. It has an onboard 3.3V regulator that can handle the 350mA peak current, and a level shifter to allow 3 or 5V logic level. The antenna layout is identical to TI's suggested layout and we're using the same components, trace arrangement, and antenna so the board maintains its FCC emitter compliance (you'll still need to perform FCC validation for a finished product, but the WiFi part is taken care of). Even though it's got an onboard antenna we were pretty surprised at the range, as good as a smartphone's.Each order comes with one fully assembled and tested breakout and a small stick of header you can use to solder in and plug into a breadboard. We don't have a detailed tutorial yet but to get you started, we've got a fully working Arduino library that is based off of TI's codebase but adapted for use with the AVR. We also have example code showing how to scan the SSID's, connect to your access point and run DHCP, do a DNS lookup to IP address, ping a site and connect to a remote TCP socket such as a website and print out the page.Please note the hardware is good, but the library code does not yet support all of the CC3000's functionality. At this moment, SSID scanning, connection, DHCP, DNS lookup, ping, and UDP/TCP client & TCP server connections (eg connect to a website and grab data or host a very short website) all work and are tested with example code. Check out our tutorial for wiring and Arduino library downloadsFor use with Arduino Uno, Leonardo/Micro & Mega only at this time - we'll try to get the code ported to the Due at some point but no ETA.

Adafruit CC3000 Breakout with Onboard Ceramic Antenna (0:16)

Add Internet to your next project with an adorable, bite-sized WiFi microcontroller, at a price you like! The ESP8266 processor from Espressif is an 80 MHz microcontroller with a full WiFi front-end (both as client and access point) and TCP/IP stack with DNS support as well. While this chip has been very popular, its also been very difficult to use. Most of the low cost modules are not breadboard friendly, don't have an onboard 500mA 3.3V regulator or level shifting, and aren't CE or FCC emitter certified....UNTIL NOW!

The Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 breakout is what we designed to make working with this chip super easy and a lot of fun. We took a certified module with an onboard antenna, and plenty of pins, and soldered it onto our designed breakout PCBs. We added in:

Reset button,

User button that can also put the chip into bootloading mode,

Red LED you can blink,

Level shifting on the UART and reset pin,

3.3V out, 500mA regulator (you'll want to assume the ESP8266 can draw up to 250mA so budget accordingly)

Two diode-protected power inputs (one for a USB cable, another for a battery)

Two parallel, breadboard-friendly breakouts on either side give you access to:

1 x Analog input (1.0V max)

9 x GPIO (3.3V logic), which can also be used for I2C or SPI

2 x UART pins

2 x 3-6V power inputs, reset, enable, LDO-disable, 3.3V output

One breakout at the end has an "FTDI" pinout so you can plug in an FTDI or console cable to upload software and read/write debugging information via the UART. When you're done with your coding, remove the cable, and this little module can be embeded into your project box.

Each module comes pre-loaded with NodeMCU's Lua interpreter (NodeMCU 0.9.5 build 20150318 / Lua 5.1.4 to be specific), you can run commands, and 'save' Lua programs directly to the module's Flash using a USB-Serial converter cable. But, if you'd like, you can skip Lua and go direct to using the Arduino IDE. Once you download the ESP8266 core, you can treat it just like a microcontroller+WiFi board, no other processors needed!

Each order comes with one assembled and tested HUZZAH ESP8266 breakout board, and a stick of 0.1" header that you can solder on and plug the breakout into a breadboard. A soldering iron and solder are required for that, and aren't included. Solderless breadboard also not included. You'll really want a USB-serial cable such as a USB console cable (good for Windows, not suggested for MacOSX users),  FTDI Friend (great for any OS), or FTDI cable (great for any OS)  to upload software to the HUZZAH ESP8266! Our essential tutorial has wiring, pinouts, assembly, downloads, and more!

So it turns out that your XBee based device would work even better as a Bluetooth device… that probably means back to the drawing board, right? Well not anymore! Now you can swap in Bluetooth functionality without a major hardware redesign!

The RN42XV is a small form factor, low power Bluetooth radio module offering plug-in compatibility for the widely used 2 x 10 (2mm) socket typically used for 802.15.4 radio modules. Based on the popular 2 x 10 (2mm) socket footprint often found in embedded applications, the Roving Networks’ RN42XV module provides Bluetooth connectivity in legacy and existing designs that may have been based upon the 802.15.4 standard.

The RN42XV Class 2 Bluetooth module is based on the RN42. This module supports multiple interface protocols, is simple to design in, and is fully certified, making it a complete embedded Bluetooth solution. With its high-performance, on-chip antenna and support for Bluetooth EDR, the RN42 delivers up to a 3 Mbps data rate for distances up to 20 meters.

Features

Fully certified Bluetooth® version 2.1 module, supports version 2.1 + Enhanced Data Rate (EDR)

Backwards-compatible with Bluetooth version 2.0, 1.2, and 1.1

Pin compatible with widely used 2 x 10 2-mm socket typically used for 802.15.4 applications

Low power: 26 uA sleep, 3 mA connected, 30 mA transmit

UART (SPP or HCI) and USB (HCI only) data connection interfaces

Sustained SPP data rates: 240 Kbps (slave), 300 Kbps (master)

Embedded Bluetooth stack profiles included (requires no host stack): GAP, SDP, RFCOMM, and L2CAP protocols, with SPP, HID and DUN profile support

Bluetooth SIG certified

Certifications: FCC, IC, CE

PCB trace antenna