nRF9160 DK - nRF52840

Overview

The nRF52840 SoC on the nRF9160 DK (PCA10090) hardware provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 ARM Cortex-M4F CPU and the following devices:

  • CLOCK

  • FLASH

  • GPIO

  • MPU

  • NVIC

  • PWM

  • RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4)

  • RTC

  • Segger RTT (RTT Console)

  • UART

  • WDT

The nRF52840 SoC does not have any connection to the any of the LEDs, buttons, switches, and Arduino pin headers on the nRF9160 DK board. It is, however, possible to route some of the pins of the nRF52840 SoC to the nRF9160 SiP.

More information about the board can be found at the Nordic Low power cellular IoT 1 website. The Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter 2 contains the processor’s information and the datasheet.

Note

In previous Zephyr releases this board was named nrf52840_pca10090.

Hardware

The nRF9160 DK has two external oscillators. The frequency of the slow clock is 32.768 kHz. The frequency of the main clock is 32 MHz.

Supported Features

The nrf9160dk_nrf52840 board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

CLOCK

on-chip

clock_control

FLASH

on-chip

flash

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

MPU

on-chip

arch/arm

NVIC

on-chip

arch/arm

PWM

on-chip

pwm

RADIO

on-chip

Bluetooth, ieee802154

RTC

on-chip

system clock

RTT

Segger

console

UART

on-chip

serial

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

Programming and Debugging

Applications for the nrf9160dk_nrf52840 board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Make sure that the PROG/DEBUG switch on the DK is set to nRF52.

Flashing

Follow the instructions in the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to install and configure all the necessary software. Further information can be found in Flashing. Then build and flash applications as usual (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Remember to set the PROG/DEBUG switch on the DK to nRF52.

See the following example for the Hello World application.

First, run your favorite terminal program to listen for output.

$ minicom -D <tty_device> -b 115200

Replace <tty_device> with the port where the nRF52840 SoC is connected to. Usually, under Linux it will be /dev/ttyACM1. The /dev/ttyACM0 port is connected to the nRF9160 SiP on the board.

Then build and flash the application in the usual way.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nrf9160dk_nrf52840 samples/hello_world
west flash

Debugging

Refer to the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to learn about debugging Nordic boards with a Segger IC.

Remember to set the PROG/DEBUG switch on the DK to nRF52.

Board controller firmware

The board controller firmware is a small snippet of code that takes care of routing specific pins on nRF9160 SiP to different components on the board, such as LEDs, switches, and specific nRF52840 SoC pins.

When compiling a project for nrf9160dk_nrf52840, the board controller firmware will be compiled and run automatically after the Kernel has been initialized.

By default, the board controller firmware will route the following:

Component

Routed to

nRF9160 UART0

VCOM0

nRF9160 UART1

VCOM2

LEDs 1-4

physical LEDs

Buttons 1-2

physical buttons

Switches 1-2

physical switches

MCU Interface 0

Arduino pin headers

MCU Interface 1

Trace interface

MCU Interface 2

COEX interface

It is possible to configure the behavior of the board controller firmware by using Kconfig and editing its options under “Board options”.