NearMeter Technologies has put NINASENSE nRF on Crowd Supply as an upcoming campaign. It is a small open hardware board for battery-powered sensors, with Bluetooth LE for short range and LoRa for long range. Hackster.io wrote about it on 29 October 2026.

Hardware

  • Nordic nRF52832 (Arm Cortex-M4F, 64 MHz) with Bluetooth LE
  • LLCC68-based LoRa/sub-GHz radio, with a helical antenna or an SMA connector
  • LIS2DH12 three-axis accelerometer for motion and vibration
  • Hall sensor support and an interface for DS18B20 temperature probes
  • 8 GPIOs, 3 of them analog-capable, plus dedicated battery voltage measurement
  • SWD for programming and debugging
  • 57 × 28 mm, four-layer PCB, with support for AAA battery holders

The more interesting part is what is missing. There is no USB port, no USB-to-serial chip, no charger and no always-on regulator. Those parts make a dev board convenient, but they also drain the battery while the microcontroller sleeps. NearMeter says that with a suitable duty cycle the board can run for months or years on two AAA cells.

How it connects

Close to the house, the board talks to Home Assistant directly over Bluetooth. Further away it sends data over LoRa to a second NINASENSE board in bridge mode, which feeds the same Home Assistant setup. The LoRa link runs NearMeter's own bidirectional protocol, NinaLink, between the node and the bridge.

Bridge mode can also receive data from some existing FSK/GFSK wireless sensors. The list of supported or in-progress models includes VEVOR YT60234, Ambient Weather / Ecowitt WH31E, Ecowitt WH51 and Ecowitt WH52. There is also Bluetooth beacon mode and experimental OpenHaystack tracking.

Programming with an LLM

nRFClaw Studio is the companion software. You connect to the board over Bluetooth, describe the job in plain language and an LLM of your choice generates the application, which is then flashed over the air. After that the program runs on the board itself, with no cloud dependency. If you prefer to write firmware yourself, normal nRF52 development over SWD is still possible.

What is not known yet

nRFClaw Studio is already on GitHub. The schematic and bill of materials will be published during the campaign, with the Home Assistant integration, NinaLink code and examples following later. Price and launch date have not been announced.