Würth Elektronik Proteus-III-SPI Bluetooth Low Energy 5.1 module

Würth Elektronik has introduced the Proteus-III-SPI Bluetooth Low Energy 5.1 module — a variant of the Proteus-III that uses an SPI instead of a UART interface.

Based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 chipset, the module exploits the possibilities of the Bluetooth Low Energy 5.1 standard, achieving high performance. With a payload of up to 964 B, the module offers four times the throughput of most Bluetooth low-energy modules, the company claims. As the SPI allows a higher data rate than the UART, with 1.5 times the end-to-end data throughput, the SPI variant bypasses potential bottlenecks on the application side.

The Proteus-III-SPI variant — identical in terms of hardware — is suitable for applications in which no free UART interface is available, or if the data throughput of the UART interface is insufficient. The SPI variant is also designed to be more power efficient. The integration workload is slightly higher with SPI, but Würth Elektronik provides a convenient wireless connectivity software development kit (SDK) for this task.

The Bluetooth module measures just 8 x 12 x 2 mm, with an integrated antenna, encryption technology and six configurable I/O pins, and is suitable for IoT and M2M applications in radio-based maintenance interfaces and sensor networks. It offers a good alternative to the SPP (Serial Port Profile) mode for serial data transmission, which is no longer included in the standard but is useful for industrial applications. A long-range mode is included.