Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense

The Nano 33 BLE Sense (without headers) is Arduino’s 3.3V AI enabled board in the smallest available form factor: 45x18mm!

The Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense is a completely new board on a well-known form factor. It comes with a series of embedded sensors:

• 9 axis inertial sensor: what makes this board ideal for wearable devices
• humidity, and temperature sensor: to get highly accurate measurements of the environmental conditions
• barometric sensor: you could make a simple weather station
• microphone: to capture and analyse sound in real time
• gesture, proximity, light color and light intensity sensor : estimate the room’s luminosity, but also whether someone is moving close to the board

The Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense is an evolution of the traditional Arduino Nano, but featuring a lot more powerful processor, the nRF52840 from Nordic Semiconductors, a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M4 CPU running at 64 MHz. This will allow you to make larger programs than with the Arduino Uno (it has 1MB of program memory, 32 times bigger), and with a lot more variables (the RAM is 128 times bigger). The main processor includes other amazing features like Bluetooth® pairing via NFC and ultra low power consumption modes.

Embedded Artificial Intelligence 

The main feature of this board, besides the impressive selection of sensors, is the possibility of running Edge Computing applications (AI) on it using TinyML. You can create your machine learning models using TensorFlow™ Lite and upload them to your board using the Arduino IDE.

Arduino’s developer Sandeep Mistry and Arduino’s advisor Dominic Pajak have prepared an introductory tutorial to AI on the Nano 33 BLE Sense, but also a more advanced guide on color detection.

An Improved Arduino Nano

If you used Arduino Nano in your projects in the past, the Nano 33 BLE Sense is a pin-equivalent substitute. Your code will still work, but remember, it operates at 3.3V. This means that you need to revise your original design in case it is not 3.3V compatible. Besides that, the main differences to the classic Nano are: a better processor, a micro-USB connector, and all of the sensors mentioned above.

You can get the board with or without headers, what will allow you embedding the Nano inside any kind of inventions, including wearables. The board comes with tessellated connectors and no components on the B-side. These features allow you to solder the board directly onto your own design, minimizing the height of your whole prototype. 

Bluetooth® and BLE 

The communications chipset on the Nano 33 BLE Sense can be both a BLE and Bluetooth® client and host device. Something pretty unique in the world of microcontroller platforms. If you want to see how easy it is to create a Bluetooth® central or a peripheral device, explore the examples at our ArduinoBLE library.

The Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense is based on the nRF52840 microcontroller.