Bluetooth board selection?

Wireless & IoT Bluetooth
1

Hi All,

I am a relative beginner (not a software or electrical engineer), my experience is with the Arduino Uno, Pro Micro, and Nano 33 BLE Sense. However, I want to build an arduino board to control primitive lights and motors from a smartphone bluetooth signal. I’ve been looking at the nRF52840 chips, mainly the SparkFun Pro nRF52840 Mini or Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Express because I like the integrated chipset, but now I am seeing the Artemis chips, namely the Redboard Artemis Nano and Thing Plus Artemis. I guess I could also use a Nano 33 BLE, or Nano 33 IoT, but they seem older and less cool.

Which bluetooth board should I use for a simple smartphone-connected device? What is the difference between the NRF52 boards and the Artemis boards?

2

The Artemis has a few more input/output pins and a bit more RAM (384k vs 256k on the NRF52), but it is a bit newer so the NRF52 boards have a more established ecosystem (Nordic makes the chip )

Overall, I’d recommend the Artemis Thing Plus…it’ll be a bit faster, has more pins available, and is a bit less than the NRF52 (but pick the NRF52 is you want/need to mount the device as a disk drive :smiley: )