Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit LE (nRF52832)

Overview

The Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit LE is Adafruit's native-BLE Feather, built around Nordic Semiconductor's nRF52832. Unlike boards that add BLE as a separate module, the nRF52832 is a true SoC with the ARM Cortex-M4F and BLE 5.0-compatible radio integrated on a single chip running at 64 MHz with hardware floating-point acceleration.

With 512KB of flash and 64KB of RAM, the nRF52832 provides far more resources than the nRF51822-based boards it supersedes. The ARM Cortex-M4F core handles complex BLE profiles, sensor fusion, and DSP operations that would overwhelm an M0 or 8-bit MCU. Up to +4 dBm transmit power and -96 dBm receive sensitivity give excellent range for a BLE device.

The FCC/IC/TELEC certified module makes the Feather nRF52 suitable for shipping in products destined for commercial deployment without additional certification burden. SoftDevice S132 handles BLE stack duties, freeing the application core for user code written in Arduino or even Adafruit's Bluefruit nRF52 libraries.

Hardware features include 19 GPIO pins, 8 analog inputs (12-bit ADC), up to 12 PWM outputs, hardware I2C/SPI/UART, NFC antenna pads, and an SWD debug connector. The built-in LiPo charger and USB serial converter round out the standard Feather feature set.