The Light Blue Bean, now on Windows

We’ve been following Punch Through Design’s Light Blue Bean since the Bean was had only just entered pre-order and was called the Cortado, and one of the features that really made the Bean stand out when it was announced was that it was going to have the ability to write, and then upload, code directly from your iPad (or iPhone) over Bluetooth LE.

Support for development on iOS took some time coming, arriving in the middle of November last year, six months after the Bean’s initial release. However Punch Through also promised wider cross-platform support, with development environments for both Windows 8 and Android.

Today the company announced that they’ve now released their Bean Loader application for Windows onto the Windows Store, and that anyone with a computer running Windows 8—or a touch-screen enabled Windows device—can now upload code directly to their LightBlue Bean.

Punch Through has previously promised that development of their Android application will start once their iOS, OS X and Windows apps are stable—so hopefully we’ll also be seeing support for Android, the last of their promised development platforms, arriving soon.

Getting notifications over Bluetooth LE using the Light Blue Bean 

I’ve used the Bean in several of my own projects since getting hold of them back in June, and I’ve been generally impressed with the board—the hardware architecture is well thought out, and the Bean library for the Arduino is similarly impressive.

So if you have been holding off picking up a Bean until the promised Windows support arrived, you can get your your very own Bean on the Maker Shed and follow Punch Through’s getting started guide to get going.