Adafruit Bluefruit LE SPI Friend

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.

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!

Using the Bluefruit iOS App or Android App, you can quickly get your project prototyped by using your iOS or Android phone/tablet as a controller.

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 Adafruit wrote all of the firmware running on the devices themselves from scratch. Adafruit control every line of code that runs on their modules ... and so you 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 customer's needs.

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