Hello everyone, I'm part_robot. I'm completely new to Arduino - and this forum - so apologies if what I'm saying makes no sense!
I'm developing a project that sends some button presses and various sensor data to my iPhone via BLE. The Curie of the 101 is interesting to me because it's fast with out-of-the-box BLE... but once I've roughed out the basics, I'd like to build a miniature version and here I'm a bit suspicious about the Curie; the ecosystem seems pretty sparse.
So when it comes to creating my miniature BLE controller/bridge should I:
Go for the 101 and shrink down to the Curie later? Assuming there even is a hobbyiest Curie board out there as I couldn't find one.
or
Go for a standard Arduino with the aim of shrinking the package down for the prototype using something like ATtiny? E.g. Tiny BLE (link)
If you want to shrink then ATiny or Micro is probably a better place to start.
It would be easier i think to squash those down and still do what you are outlining.
The other benefit is that if you don't need a large sketch or lots of speed you could drop to the 3.3 Volt board with Lipo right off the bat almost.
If you only care about the BLE instead of neuron programming or adruino resource, you just need to pick up Nordic 51822 from google. With the smallest package I once built a device as the same size as your nail.
Also I have taken a loop at tiny. This is using serial communication to control all Bluetooth event. Apparently this is not ideal especially you have demand on the data throughput like act as both central and peripheral.