Nordic Thingy:52 Bluetooth 5 IoT Sensor Development Kit Targets Mobile & Web App Developers

Some developers may be interested in providing solutions for the Internet of Things, but they may not have the skills or interest in making their own hardware, and/or develop firmware, and just want to create demos or prototypes quickly, focusing on app development instead. Nordic Semiconductors has recently launched Thingy:52 IoT Sensor Kit with Bluetooth 5 & NFC connectivity, and various sensors for those developers.

Nordic:52 IoT Sensor development kit (nRF6936) hardware specifications:

MCU – Nordic Semi nRF52832 ARM Cortex-M4F Bluetooth 5 System on Chip (SoC)
Connectivity – Bluetooth 5 LE and NFC
Sensors
- Temperature,Humidity, Air pressure, Air quality (CO2 and TVOC), color and light intensity
- 9-axis motion sensing – Tap detection, orientation, step counter, quaternions, euler angles, rotation matrix, gravity vector, compass heading, raw accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass data
Audio
- Speaker for playing prestored samples, tones, or sound streamed over BLE (8-bit 8 kHz LoFi)
- Microphone streaming (ADPCM compressed 16-bit 16 kHz)
Expansion Headers (all unpopulated)
- 20-pin header with GPIOs, I2C, Analog inputs
- 2x 4-pin I2C headers
- 4-pin analog/digital header (2 I/O)
- 4-pin analog/digital header (1 I/O)
Misc – Configurable RGB LEDs and button; programming & debugging connector
Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port, LiPo battery connector (A battery is already included in the devkit)
Dimensions – 6×6 cm plastic & rubber case

Nordic provides example apps for Android & iOS with cloud connectivity for the devkit, as well as a web application relying on Web Bluetooth API. Thingy:52 kit supports secure Over-the-Air device firmware upgrade (DFU). While the company promote the kit to app developers, the application firmware source code and hardware design files are also available for download. You’ll find all info on Nordic Semi’s Infocenter. A Node.js library is also available for the board on Github.

Nordic Thingy:52 can be purchased for around $40 via distributors such as Mouser, Digikey, and Arrow.

Thanks to Jan for the tip.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.