I-SYST’s BLYST Nano is a Tiny ARM Cortex Module with Bluetooth and 30 I/O

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group designed the 5th iteration of wireless technology with the IoT in mind, and offers data transfer speeds of up to 2Mbps and has a range of up to 800 feet, which applies to BLE, allowing users to design devices that save on power. It also supports Bluetooth Mesh, which connects more gadgets and sensors via Bluetooth radio.

I-SYST crammed that technology into their tiny, fingernail-sized BLYST Nano SoM (System on Module) that’s based on the Nordic nRF52832 SoC, and can be integrated into a myriad of projects, including wearables, remote sensing, building/home automation, and a host of others.

The BLYST Nano packs a surprising amount of hardware into the 10 x 7 x 1.6mm module, including a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4F processor (512K Flash, 64K RAM), and on-chip NFC tag for OOB pairing. It also features a built-in ceramic antenna, coils for low-power DC/DC mode, and 32MHz and 32.768MHz crystal for low power applications.

The tiny board is even equipped with 30 programmable I/O pins with configurable mapping for both digital and analog pins. The load-out boasts 3X slave/master SPIs, 2X I2C, UART (RTS,CTS), 3X PWM, RTC, PDM, and AES HW encryption.

I-SYST is currently crowdfunding the BLYST Nano on Crowd Supply for $17, which is a steal in itself, but the company is throwing in some extras at the higher price-points, including a sensor board (temp, humidity, pressure, and more), a breakout board (for easy prototyping), and an IDAP-Link CMSIS-DAP Debug JTAG probe.