Adafruit Teases nRF52840-Based Feather Bluefruit Sense Board with Numerous On-Board Sensors

Adafruit has released preliminary details of the Feather Bluefruit Sense, an upcoming Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840-based development board which comes with a range of additional standards — including microphone, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and environmental sensors — and native USB support.

Based on the same Nordic SoC as the company's recently-launched ItsyBitsy nRF52840 Express, the CircuitPython-compatible Feather Bluefruit Sense builds on the existing Feather Bluefruit design with one major change: the addition of a range of on-board sensors, designed to make it ready-to-run out of the box for a variety of tasks.

"We removed the SWD connector and also the optional 32 kHz crystal," Adafruit explains of the new design. "In their place we added a PDM mic, LSM6DS33 accel/gyro + LIS3MDL magnetometer, SHT3x humidity sensor, BMP280 or DPS310 barometric pressure sensor, and APDS-9960 colour/light/proximity/gesture sensor. Should a fun little feather board, will pair very nicely with a Adalogger Featherwing for RTC+SD card datalogging."

With the nRF52840 at its heart the Feather Bluefruit Sense should also be capable of running TensorFlow Lite, allowing for at-the-edge artificial intelligence pulling live data from the new on-board sensors.

Adafruit has yet to announce pricing and availability for the Bluefruit Sense, but be sure to follow along with their progress on Twitter!