A quick write-up on the rfduino which arrived yesterday.
The rfduino started life out as a kickstarter project to make it easy for hardware tinkerers like myself to get access to BLE and incorporate it into our projects.
My rfduino pictured next to an SD card for scale.
It consists of a Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822Â chip, support circuitry and Bluetooth chip antenna all on a nice tiny board. The nRF51822Â contains a custom boot loader written by rfduino which when combined with an add-on to the Arduino IDE allows you to code for the device as if it was an Arduino device. This means you don’t need the Nordic Semiconductor development kit or API’s but does limit what you can do with the nRF51822 slightly.