Using Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE

Support
1

Hi Chris,

Currently, I see that Adafruit Feather M0 Bluefruit LE is out of stock. So I decided to buy a very similar board – Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE

I followed all the instructions as mentioned here to setup:

However, while I can run the firmata_blink demo from the Arduino IDE, I wasn’t successful in running the Firmata blink .mwel demo experiment.

It gives the following error:

00:00:10: ERROR: Firmata device “arduino” did not respond to request for protocol version

00:00:10: ERROR: Can’t start iodevice (arduino) and no alt tag specified

Extended information:

parser_context: mw_finalize

00:00:10: ERROR: Failed to parse experiment /var/folders/jw/dgvzbxln27d530zz4pyrqp480000gn/T/MWorks/Experiment Cache/_Users_kohitijkar_Documents_firmata_blink.mwel/tmp/_Users_kohitijkar_Documents_firmata_blink.mwel.xml

Also:

When I run the MWorks file, the Adafruit device Bluetooth LED glows momentarily before the error is shown on the MWorks console

Is this device not supported?
Thanks,
Ko

2

Hi Ko,

The 32u4 doesn’t have enough memory to run StandardFirmataBLE.

My current recommendation for a Firmata-compatible board is the Arduino Nano 33 IoT, which works well for both serial and BLE connections. Unfortunately, that one is also out of stock, at least at the Arduino store, and I don’t have an alternative to recommend. At present, I do not recommend the similar-sounding Arduino Nano 33 BLE, as we’ve had some issues with it in the DiCarlo Lab.

Sorry I can’t be more helpful!

Chris

3

Thanks for the response, Chris.

Just out of curiosity — since this board works when I use it via USB, is it possible to add it directly to the iPad via a lightning cable USB adapter?

Thanks
Ko

4

Hi Ko,

Just out of curiosity — since this board works when I use it via USB, is it possible to add it directly to the iPad via a lightning cable USB adapter?

I don’t think I’ve actually tried it, but I’m pretty sure that won’t work, as I can’t imagine that iPadOS would provide support for USB-serial interfaces.

I’d like to enable wired Firmata connections on iPad’s by adding support for Firmata over MIDI. Since the Firmata protocol itself uses MIDI messages, this should be pretty straightforward, but I haven’t had a chance to work on it yet.

Cheers,
Chris

5

Hi Chris,

Yes, if the wired Firmata connections are available, that will be great! We bought many of these 32u4 boards. So will be good to be able to use them.

Thanks,
Ko