Datasheet

nRF51 or nRF52 Bluefruit Devices?

The Bluefruit nRF52 Feather (based on the nRF52832 (https://adafru.it/vaJ) SoC) is quite different from the earlier

nRF51822 based Bluefruit products (Bluefruit M0 Feather (https://adafru.it/t6a), etc.), both of which will continue to exist.

From a hardware perspective, the nRF52 Feather is based on a much more powerful ARM Cortex M4F processor, with

512KB flash, 64KB SRAM and hardware floating point acceleration ... whereas the earlier nRF51822 is based on the

smaller ARM Cortex M0 core (fewer internal instructions), with 256KB flash and either 16KB or 32KB SRAM.

More importantly, the design approach that we took with the nRF52 is completely different:

nRF51 based Bluefruit boards run as modules that you connect to via an external MCU (typically an Atmel 32u4 or

a SAMD21), sending AT style commands over SPI or UART.

With the nRF52, you run all of your code directly on the nRF52832 and no external MCU is used or required!

This change of design helps keep the overall costs lower, allows for far better performance since you aren't limited by

the SPI or UART transport channel, and can help improve overall power consumption.

As a tradeoff, it also means a completely different API and development process, though!

nRF51 Bluefruit sketches won't run on nRF52 Bluefruit hardware without modification! The two device families

have different APIs and programming models, and aim to solve your wireless problems in two different ways.