Nordic Semiconductor announced that its nRF52832 SoC is being employed in a Bluetooth low energy (formerly Bluetooth Smart) beacon named Puck.js. The beacon can be programmed wirelessly from a website using a graphical editor or easy-to-learn JavaScript instead of C or C++, traditionally used by Bluetooth low energy beacon developers. The Puck.js project was fully funded on Kickstarter as of August 5.
“Most manufacturers conveniently gloss over the difficulties of programming their hardware, and other beacons are provided without software or left crippled by their boring factory-installed firmware,” said Gordon Williams, the UK-based Puck.js creator. “Puck.js is different. It comes with our open-source JavaScript interpreter ‘Espruino’ pre-installed, which makes it incredibly easy-to-use and means you can get started in just seconds, without any prior programming experience.”
The intentionally hacker-friendly Puck.js is open source, supports both the iBeacon and Eddystone beacon formats, and will be supplied with firmware updates for the forthcoming Bluetooth v5.0 specification that will quadruple the range and double the speed of Bluetooth v4.2. Puck.js has a circular 35-mm diameter form-factor that is 10-mm thick, with a silicone rubber cover and plastic base. It is powered from a CR2032 coin-cell battery and includes a magnetometer (digital compass), user-assignable tactile button, and four (red, green, blue, and infrared) LEDs.
Thanks to the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52832 SoC, the Puck.js benefits from an ARM Cortex-M4F processor, 64-MHz clock speed, 64 kB of RAM, 512 kB of flash, built-in NFC, over-the-air firmware updates, 12-bit ADC, timers, SPI, I2C, and serial interfaces that can be used on any available pins, plus a temperature sensor.
“JavaScript is probably the most popular programming language at the moment and the majority of web developers, makers, and students at school wouldn’t usually have used C or C++,” Williams continued. “So what I aimed to do with Puck.js was lower the barrier-to-entry and make development easier and more fun—allowing a whole bunch of people to use Bluetooth low energy beacon and IoT technologies that may otherwise be restricted to professional embedded developers.”
Williams said Puck.js is like a development kit that’s also a finished product. “You insert a battery, put the case on, and it’s a ready-to-go Bluetooth low energy beacon straight-out-the-box with no wires of software required,” he added. “At the same time it’s very easy to add new functions and features for home automation projects, IoT prototyping, or education purposes.”
Read more about Espruino and the nRF52832 SoC.
