Blend is an integrated development board, we 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.

 

Blend is 100% compatible with sketches and Shields that work with Arduino Leonardo. The micro-controller unit (MCU) is Atmel ATmega32U4 and the BLE chip is Nordic nRF8001. Blend runs as BLE peripheral role only, it allows BLE central role devices to establish connection with.

 

     

 

Current supported BLE central devices:

 

iOS 7

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

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

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	16MHz
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	73 x 54 x 12mm (120 x 73 x 25mm with packaging)
Weight	19g (37g with packaging)
I/O Pins	20

 

Operate at 3.3V or 5V

 

According to the Atmega32U4 specification, the MCU can run at either [email protected] or 16MHz@5V. Normally, you should set the voltage selection switch to 5V to run the board at 16MHz. However if you need to connect to shields or external components, such as sensors or MCU, which accept 3.3V only, you should change the operating voltage to 3.3V using the voltage selection switch.

 

Note that while Blend is running at 3.3V, the Atmega32U4 will still run at 16MHz which is outside Atmel's specification, the CPU is overclocked (we have not seen any issue so far).