The Latest Electronut Labs Nordic nRF52840 Based Dev Board
Electronut Labs has started its Crowd Supply campaign for Blip, a Nordic nRF52840 based development board. With many onboard sensors and systems, the boards are aimed at prototyping and projects in a wide variety of BLE and 802.15.4, wireless application scenarios. It has a programmer and debugger built-in.
Past Articles
Electronut Labs has a series of Nordic Semiconductor SoC projects previously reported on including Papyr, a Bluetooth E-Paper Display and Bluey, a BLE Development board using the Nordic nRF52832, and CNXSoft also published an article comparing several of the Nordic SoC available in development boards for Bluetooth 5 (BLE5).
The Features the Stand Out
Blip has a Black magic Probe compatible programmer and debugger built-in, along with a temperature/humidity sensor, ambient light intensity sensor, and a three-axis accelerometer. The board is designed to prototype very low power devices and an ability to add a microSD card slot, to make it a total solution for dev projects.
There are two shields offered, the E-Paper and Gaming
E-Paper Shield
A low power display device for $24.00.
Blipboy Gaming Shield
A handheld gaming device that can be plugged into the Blip dev board that costs $26.00.
Get Them All
All three boards, Blip, Blipboy, and E-Paper displayed can be purchased as a kit for $99.00
Supports For a Number Of Resources
-
- Nordic Semiconductor nRFS SDK
- Zephyr RTOS
- Arduino
- Circuit Python
There is an Android/iOS App and a Bluetooth web interface.
Features
-
- Controller: Raytac MDBT50Q-1M module based on Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52840 module with FCC/TELEC/CE certification
- Accelerometer: LIS2DH12 high-performance three-axis “femto” accelerometer
- Ambient Light Sensor: LTR-329ALS-01
- Humidity and Temperature Sensor: Si7006-A20
- Debugger: STM32F103CBT6 as Black Magic Probe debugger (can be used to debug external chips also)
- NFC Antenna
- MicroSD slot
- GPIO: 28 pins on the header
- Power Supply: USB, JST connector for Li-Ion/Li-Po
- Battery Management BQ24079 battery charging and power management IC
Nordic nRF52840
-
- 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F CPU running at 64 MHz
- 1 MB flash, 256 KB RAM
- Bluetooth 5 multi-protocol radio, with 802.15.4 support for Thread and Zigbee
- Full speed USB
- QSPI/SPI/TWI/I²S/PDM/QDEC
- 32 MHz SPI
- 12-bit 200 ksps ADC
| Blip Board Labelled | |
|---|---|
| A. User button | H. LiPo battery connector |
| B. nRF52840 module (MDBT50Q) | I. LiPo charger (BQ24079RGTR) |
| C. nRF RESET | J. Black Magic Probe programmer (STM32F103CBU6) |
| D. nRF USB | K. Temp/Humidity sensor (S170065-A20) |
| E. Three-axis accelerometer (LIS2DH12TR) | L. RGB LED |
| F. Power selection switch | M. Ambient light sensor (LTR-329ALS-01) |
| G. Programmer / debugger USB | N. NFC antenna |
More Choices For Development
Blip’s schematic, BOM, documentation, and various example projects are available on our documentation portal.
Sample firmware, datasheet, images, etc. can currently be found in this GitLab repository.
Shipping Timeline
Early orders ship November 13, 2019, E-Paper Shield and the Blipboy Gaming Shield is expected to ship on January 30, 2020.
Further Information
For further information or background on Blip please check out the Crowd Supply campaign and the Electronut website.
Stephen started writing about technology after publishing sci-fi short stories. His first White-Paper, written in 2008, was well received and inspired him to continue writing about technology. Today he writes in the technology space full time, covering a multitude of topics. During the time he wrote part-time he edited hundreds of titles for large publishers, in science and technology. He lives in Staten Island, with his wife and children.
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