Or, play this little guy while running up and down some piano stairs while the kettle fife blows off some steam.

Bean Battles Hacks Software Ecosystem Became

The company says that after selling more than 100,000 Bean devices, the challenge of keeping up with a constantly evolving software ecosystem became too difficult, and they are instead going to focus their efforts on advising other companies on how to best develop Bluetooth products.

While the Bean family of devices clearly wasnt able to go the distance, Punch Through at least got them out the door and supported them for longer than many might have expected given the increased competition in the BLE market.

Its not hard to do the math: the LightBlue Bean retailed for around 35 USD, and today you can get a BLE-capable ESP32 for five bucks.

Bean Battles Hacks Code To The

This piece of software is used to push code to the device over Bluetooth, and its possible that the constant march of operating system upgrades (especially on mobile devices) will eventually break it.

Long story short, theres nothing to worry about in the short term.

If theres significant demand, we imagine the community will do their best to take over development of whatever ancillary software is required to keep the hardware usable for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of which, the schematics and PCB layouts for both the Bean and Bean have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, so its not outside the realm of possibility that somebody else might put them back into production.

The tagline for the hardware is A Bluetooth Arduino for the Mobile Age which confirms that the hardware is targeted at a no-hassle, get it connected right now sort of application.

The Bean augments this hardware with a 300m range increase, an integrated LiPo (600mAh or more), and headersconnectors where there were only solder pads before.

The good news is that these are ecosystem upgrades and will work for existing Bean hardware too.

The entire thing comes with online-platform integration and easy to use Smartphone tools to guide you through connecting and making something useful.

There is a slider switch near the pin sockets marked A3, A4, A5 which toggles between 3.3v and 5v so that no level shifters are needed for sensors and other hardware you might use with it.

The white connectors seen near the bottom of this image are Grove connectors.

These provide I2C and Analog support to that ecosystem of add-on boards.

The MSRP will be 45 but early backers can get in around 10-25 less than that.

It is an each choice for drop-in no hassle connectivity when bottom line isnt your top concern.

Simone Giertz of Punch Through Design has created a mini electric ukulele using a LightBlue Bean.

The Bean is an Arduino-compatible microcontroller that you can wirelessly program using Bluetooth low energy (BLE).

Four 1M ohm resistors are soldered to individual wire strings.

A different set of wire strings in the ukuleles neck are connected to the same ground as the Bean.

In order to play this tiny instrument, a finger must be kept on the ground strings while the other tone strings are touched by a different finger.

Simone uses Arduinos Capacitive Sensing Library to determine which string is being touched and what the tone will be (indicated in Hz).

There is no need to fret when the battery is depleted from using this at an all-night luau: the frame can be unscrewed with easy access to the battery.