Blend Micro is RedBearLabs first integrated development board. They have "blend"ed Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a single board. It is targeted for makers to develop low power Internet-Of-Things (IoT) projects quickly and easily.

The micro-controller unit (MCU) is Atmel ATmega32U4 and the BLE chip is Nordic nRF8001. Blend Micro runs as BLE peripheral role only, it allows BLE central role devices to establish connection with.

Current supported BLE central devices:

iOS 7

iPhone 4s
iPhone 5 (all models)
iPod touch 5
iPad 3/4/mini/Air

Android 4.3 or above (4.4 recommended for stability) with Bluetooth 4.0 hardware support

Nexus 4
Nexus 5
Nexus 7
other compatible Android devices reported by our users

Windows Phone 8.1

Nokia Lumia 630

Windows 8.1 with built-in Bluetooth 4.0 or USB dongle

Mac OSX 10.9.2 with built-in Bluetooth 4.0 or USB dongle

Linux with BlueZ 5.1 with built-in Bluetooth 4.0 or USB dongle

Getting Started

We recommend using Codebender, an online development and collaboration platform for all Arduino users, please read to our Quick Start with Codebender to start playing with your Blend Micro in just a few easy steps.

We have also prepared a detail guide Getting Started with Blend Micro to show you how to program your Blend Micro with Arduino IDE.

Specification:

Microcontroller	Atmel ATmega32U4
Wireless Chip	Nordic nRF8001
Operating Voltage	3.3V or 5V
Input Voltage	5V (USB) 6.5-12V (DC input or VIN)
Clock Speed	8MHz
Connectivity	Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy micro-USB Serial (TX/RX) I2C SPI
Flash Memory	32KB (of which 4 KB used by bootloader)
SRAM	2.5KB
EEPROM	1KB
Dimensions	43.6 x 18.4 x 4.3mm (83 x 58 x 25mm with packaging)
Weight	4g (19g with packaging)
I/O Pins	17

Operate at 3.3V or 5V

According to the Atmega32U4 specification, this MCU can run at either 8MHz/3.3V or 16MHz/5V. We have desigend the Blend Micro to run at 3.3V only in order to reduce level shifting components and make it as small as possible; it is because the nRF8001 chip only accepts 3.3V. The onboard LDO converts 5V from the USB power source into 3.3V for the board.

Normally, you should set Blend Micro to run at 8 MHz/3.3V. However, if you want to run faster and not concern about the reliabilty (we do not see any issue so far), you can run it as 16 MHz and this is so-call "overclock".

Support

For questions about Nordic Bluetooth low energy SDK for Arduino, please visit Nordic Developer Zone

All other questions regarding Blend, please visit the Blend Forum