I have been testing out the boards and building more of them so I can get the project up and running. I also updated the website so you can check it out if you want more details. Still pretty preliminary, but starting to get some good information on it!
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Quick status update. Things are moving along, I can now provision the Nordic nrf51ās with the Spark Cloud (thanks @zachary and @mdma!). I also have the FW updates set up to save to the SPI flash, so as soon as I get the bootloader finished, I should have full OTA updates working.
Last night I tired loading the Tinker app onto the board. Works well! Hereās a quick video showing it working
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Thatās amazing! Keep up the great work! Iām really excited to get my hands on those pieces, they will perfectly fill the gap of low powered wireless microcontroller!
One more update. The bootloader is working and so I can now flash FW updates to the board through the cloud and have them loaded up properly!
I also set up an initial survey for people to provide feedback and so I can try to nail down some details. It is pretty quick, so if you have the time to fill it out, I very much appreciate it. Thanks!
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Happened to have all the different bluz prototypes this morning and just had to take a picture. From left to right, this sort of sums up the last 8 months, from working with dev kits and having the āhandshake MCUā, up to breadboarding, to the new 32k RAM nrf51, and finally to the first actual working boards.
Pretty awesome to see peopleās excitement and feedback on the project, canāt wait to launch and see where this goes!
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Great stuff! Iām super excited to have one(or 10, or 20 :D) of those in my hands
Just getting too excited as the whole project is really starting to come together! Here is a prototype gateway that takes a Core and has a BLE central that can connect up to 8 Bluz DKās!
Weāre gonna package this into a nice final form factor as well so it can be used in products in peopleās homes.
If you havenāt taken the survey and want to provide feedback, it would be greatly appreciated!
http://bluz.io/initialSurvey/
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I neeeeeed one of these. That is so awesome. Great work!!!
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I: need also one of these 
what about more than 8 bluz dk ?
Just saw your question, sorry for the delay!
For the gateway, Nordic currently supports 8 simultaneous connections when using their central device. I thought that I read somewhere that the number may be increasing based on the new nrf51 with more RAM, however, I canāt seem to find that now. If they increase it, so will I!
If you need more than 8 devices, you can easily just get more gateways, the connections will happen automatically, so it is pretty easy to drop in what you need
Getting the stackable shields setup! Here is a Bluz board with the CR2032 battery shield and the new ADXL335 accelerometer shield, all still plugged into a breadboard.
Weāre gearing up for launch, so keep a close eye, things are going to start happening over the next few weeks!
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you gonna enable ant+ on this? i know a few bicycle folks that might be interestedā¦
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Certainly possible, the HW will support it. Definitely a feature that can be added in the future, but there will also be a J-Link shield too so you can program the board directly now, so certainly ant+ is a way to use it.
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Interesting, it appears as if there is some sort of clock counting down on our websiteā¦
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just set a calendar reminderā¦
Getting a few demos setup for the Kickstarter launch, thought I would share one here.
I took a Bluz board and stacked it on the accelerometer shield and the CR2032 battery shield and set it up to publish data every second for x,y,z.
Then I just made a simple web app which renders a 3D shape and matches the rotation of the object to the measurements fro the Bluz+Accelerometer shield. You can see it here:
UPDATE: I changed the demo a bit to go through my local cloud instead of the public one, no need to worry about rate limiting that way. I still was only measuring about 10 times a second, but much more responsive than before. See it here:
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great!
@eely22 how quick is it in terms of latency? from the accelerometer to the net?
I was using Spark.publish for this demo, so I was obeying the 1 event/second limit, hence why the 3D shape looks jumpy.
When doing things like functions calls, though, the latency is pretty quick. Maybe a few ms slower then a Core, but plenty fast.
And obviously you could do a lot better than 1 Hz using something other than Spark Publish but then you lose the convenience of the cloud. If this was just local then a TCP or UDP packet would be crazy fast.
I am really excited to see this happen!! I think it is a great idea( I might have to buy 10!) Now on to the questions
- Do I have to connect it to the internet?
- Could it be totally dependent?(can I make an android app and have an accelerometer control toggles, etc)
- How long can it last on a coin cell battery?
-@fishy4341
P.S.
I think if all my questions are answered I might use this instead of my photon I pre-ordered( I am making a smart-watch )
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