The Blend Micro board produced by RedBearLabs combines the ATmega32U4 chip used in many Arduino boards with the Nordic nRF8001 Bluetooth chips. The boards are very small, but still feature the same functions as a normal Arduino board with the added feature of BLE. This board can connect to anything that supports Bluetooth version 4.0 and above.

In order to be able to program the board from the Arduino IDE, we need to add support for this type of board. In the Arduino IDE 1.6.4 and above, adding support has been made very easy. If you take a look in the menu by navigating to Tools | Boards, at the top of the list you will find the Boards Manager…. If you open it up, it should look something like Figure 7.1:

Figure 7.1: The Boards Manager

Just search for Blend Micro and press the Install button and all the necessary files to support the Blend Micro board will be installed. If you are using an older version of the IDE, you will need to manually modify the IDE according to the...