Seeed Studio Opens Pre-Orders for nRF52840 XIAO BLE and XIAO BLE Sense TinyML Bluetooth Dev Boards

Seeed Studio has introduced one other entry in its XIAO microcontroller household, this time placing a Nordic nRF52840 at its coronary heart to supply Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity: the XIAO BLE, and its sensor-equipped sibling the XIAO BLE Sense.

Launched two years in the past, and up to date just some months in the past with a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based mannequin, Seeed Studio’s XIAO household — named after the Chinese language for “small” — goals to pack as a lot performance in as small an area as attainable. Suitable with each breadboard use and floor mounting as a module, the XIAO household is standard — and the brand new XIAO BLE will seemingly enhance that recognition nonetheless additional.

The primary XIAO to incorporate an on-board radio, the XIAO BLE is constructed round a Nordic nRF52840 system-on-chip — which means it contains Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity as commonplace. There is a single-core Arm Cortex-M4 processor with floating-point coprocessor working at as much as 64MHz, help for near-field communication (NFC) and Zigbee communication, 256kB of RAM, 1MB of inside flash, and 2MB of exterior QSPI flash.

As commonplace, the board echoes the standard XIAO pinout with 11 general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins, all of which help pulse-width modulation and 6 supporting analog inputs. This time round, although, patrons have the selection of embedded sensors: Whereas the bottom XIAO BLE lacks any built-in sensors, the XIAO BLE Sense contains an on-board digital microphone and six-axis inertial measurement unit.

It is the latter mannequin Seeed is hoping will enchantment to these engaged on tinyML and edge AI tasks, showcasing its capabilities by having a unit play host to a speech recognition demo pushed by the favored Edge Impulse platform. Different options embody a claimed 5μA sleep mode, on-board battery charging, and a user-addressable three-color LED, together with a bodily reset button.

Seeed has opened pre-orders for the brand new boards at $9.99 for the bottom mannequin and $15.99 for the XIAO BLE Sense; all fashions are anticipated to start delivery in mid-December.