Bleduino32u4

Since I created the first BLE-Shield I was thinking of an Arduino clone with integrated BLE capabilities, but I was unsure which microcontroller to use. Now you can see what I have choosen for the initial BLE-Duino board out of my hands: The ATmega32u4. The BLE-Duino should be completely SMD based. I don’t want to use and through hole parts and I really hate the big USB-A connector. I already had a board with a Lipo Header and a charging circuits, but I somehow messed it up, so I decided to go one step back on v0.6 and use a power regulator to get 3.3V for the 32u4 and the BLE112. The BLE-Duino v0.6 is currently running a LillypadUSB boot loader at 3.3V 8MHz. The LED attached to D13 is able to blink and the most important part: Sending and receiving data over Bluetooth to and from the USB port is working as well.

I will add the Lipo header and the charging circuit in the next iteration, but the most important question I need to answer is if I probably switch to a 5V design with 16MHz and use the original Leonardo bootloader.

That’s were you guys can probably help me. What do you think? If I will use a 5V design, I need to add a boost converter to increate the 3.7V from the Lipo to 5V as well. There is lot of space on the board left, so don’t worry about that.

Of course I’ll add a switch to turn the BLE-Duino on and off and I really like to add a buzzer to make noise like an alert melody using the tone library of the Arduino. Let’s discuss the functionality on my forum where I created a corresponding area.

Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading and your appreciated interest in my work,

Michael.