Custom Bluetooth Low Energy board with 2.4GHz antenna hack and Nordic nRF51822…

Custom Bluetooth Low Energy board with 2.4GHz antenna hack and Nordic nRF51822…

I wanted to experiment with Bluetooth Low Energy:

  • Can you hack together in your garage an antenna and RF section that will work at 2.4GHz?
  • If it works, who good/bad will it be?
  • What is hand soldering QFN packages like? Many BLE devices are only available in CSP or QFN48.

If you want to make IoT and Wearable devices that can be controlled from your phone/tablet/whatever, ZigBee is a neat mesh networking technology; but it’s not in any phones. Bluetooth (and more recently) Bluetooth Low Energy is in all of them. It’s easy to write a BLE control app write yourself using the Cocoa frameworks or download one like the excellent LightBlue for iPhone: