'RFduino' joins open-source RF movement

LONDON – Wireless startup Open Source RF (Hermosa Beach, Calif.) has released the RFduino board based on the nRF51822 Bluetooth system-chip from Nordic Semiconductor ASA (Oslo, Norway).

The board is said to enable students, amateurs and professional engineers develop applications that can be controlled from a Bluetooth v4.0 compatible smartphone or tablet computer at low cost.

The development of the Arduino-compatible board has been funded under the Kickstarter program since the formation of Open Source RF in 2012. Arduino is an open-source electronic prototyping platform based on standardized microcontroller boards.

The announcement of RFarduino comes alongside a number of similar developments including the launch of the Myriad-RF organization by Lime Microsystems Ltd. (Guildford, England) and the BladeRF board by Nuand (Santa Clara, Calif.) (see RFboard takes Arduino-like approach).

Arduino already has ZigBee-compatible boards but Nordic claims RFduino is the first Arduino-compatble board that can communicate wirelessly with Bluetooth v4.0 compatible smartphones and tablet computers. The board includes a Bluetooth module, the RFD51822, made by RF Digital Corp. (Hemosa Beach, Calif.) that includes the Nordic silicon.

The board can make use of the 32-bit Cortex-M0 core that is present within the nRF51822, a chip which operates at 2.4-GHz and has been passed as FCC- and CE-complaint. Developers can use the nRF51 software development kit from Nordic to develop prototype applications.



RFduino is a Bluetooth 4.0 compatible board that allows smartphone or tablet control of applications.