Here at Blues Wireless, we are committed to accelerating your IoT journey by offering products and services that fill the gap where projects traditionally stall or fail completely.
Case in point, the Notecard provides cost-effective and low-power cellular connectivity for global IoT solutions, of all shapes and sizes.
Whether you’re a hobbyist spinning up a fun backyard project or a business looking to scale with cellular, the Notecard is an equally valid solution. The same goes with providing that “last mile” of cloud connectivity with Notehub.io. With Notehub.io you can securely route sensor data from the Notecard to your cloud application of choice.
But “filling the gap” can also mean providing products and services that extend beyond what you think of as our core product set, that likely being cellular communications!
Introducing the Swan
Today is a big day for Blues Wireless, as we are proud to introduce the most extensible Feather-compatible MCU on the market: the Swan!
Uniquely for Feather-compatible boards, we designed the Swan to satisfy developer needs from early prototyping through high-volume deployments. Developers can use Swan in conjunction with Adafruit’s myriad sensors and FeatherWing-compatible carriers. Or, due to its novel design consisting of a set of castellated edges around the board, the low-cost Swan can also be soldered directly to a parent PCB in order to utilize the full range of Swan’s I/O capabilities.
Based on the powerful STM32L4R5 microcontroller from STMicroelectronics, the Swan operates at up to 120Mhz and provides developers access to 640KB of RAM, 2MB of flash, and 55 general purpose I/O ports including:
- 8 Analog
- 16 Digital
- 1 SPI
- 1 Quad SPI
- 2 I2C
- 4 UART
- 1 USB
When operating in its low-power mode, the Swan board draws only about 8uA while retaining all of its memory, making it suitable for battery-powered devices. Swan also includes a CORTEX Debug connector enabling use of advanced development environments such as Visual Studio Code, IAR, and STM32CubeIDE.
Swan features support for C/C++, Arduino, and CircuitPython, and supports step-debugging in VSCode, IAR, and STM32CubeIDE with an optional STLINK-V3MINI.
“While building Notecard-based remote monitoring solutions, customers have repeatedly asked us for recommendations that might help accelerate their creation of highly-intelligent battery-powered devices,” said Ray Ozzie, founder, and CEO of Blues Wireless. “To them there are many impediments, and our core mission is to help them reduce the time from concept-to-deployment and concept-to-value. Swan, as with Notecard, is a unique solution that will accelerate their journey and get them to delivery and scale with enterprise-class security, quality, and robustness.”
The Swan Notecarrier
We are also making it easy to use the Swan and Notecard together with a new Notecarrier-AF option (or, you can purchase Swan on its own):
- The Feather Starter Kit for Swan includes a Notecarrier-AF with a pre-seated Swan and pre-soldered headers (available for pre-order and expected to ship in late October).
- The Swan Kit includes the Swan, loose headers, and Swan Carrier to access the extended set of GPIO on the board.
For easy programming and step debugging in Visual Studio Code, IAR, and STM32CubeIDE, the STLINK-V3MINI is available in the Blues Wireless store as an add-on for either kit.
Available Today
Available now for $25, we’re excited to see what you build with the Swan!
