NOTE - READ BEFORE BUYING

There are a couple of issues in production run of v0.3 batch:

• Only Red and Green LEDs are usable, not blue (LED rotated 90 degrees). To make Blue work, please see section v0.3 LED workaround in docs.

• The second issue is that the castellated edges in our design were not done nicely by the manufacturer, resulting in a trace cut to P0.8 on the header. There is no easy workaround for this.

hackaBLE is a tiny (~ 18 mm x 28 mm) Open Source Nordic nRF52832 based BLE development board you can embed in your BLE projects. It's designed such that you can use it three ways:

• On a breadboard
• On a custom PCB, hand-soldered easily using the castellated 2.54 mm pitch headers
• On a custom PCB, using a stencil and oven, making use of extra pads underneath the PCB

hackaBLE uses offers more value than just using the BLE module directly - since it incorporates the necessary passive compoments - including the ones for the buck converter for power saving - and adds an RGB LED and a button for convenience. It's also much easier to solder than the bare modules.

The PCB footprint and Pinout for hackaBLE can be see in the photos above.

(The kicad footprint for hackaBLE is readily available in the git repository.)

Soldering headers

Please watch the video below.

Programming hackaBLE

hackaBLE uses the Nordic nRF52832 which in turn is based on an ARM Cortex-M4 core. So you can really program it with any ARM compatible programmer. We do have a convenient solution though, in the form of our Bumpy blackmagic probe compatible SWD debugger and our PogoProg.

Use the four SWD pins of PogoProg on hackaBLE to upload or debug hackaBLE.

Please read the bumpy documentation on using Bumpy to program hackaBLE.

For more details on nRF5 2programming, please read our guide on getting started with Nordic nRF5 SDK.