Arduino Nano 33 BLE (Sense)

Overview

The Arduino Nano 33 BLE is designed around Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52840 ARM Cortex-M4F CPU. Arduino sells 2 variants of the board, the plain BLE 1 type and the BLE Sense 2 type. The “Sense” variant is distinguished by the inclusion of more sensors, but otherwise both variants are the same.

Arduino Nano 33 BLE (Sense variant)

The Sense variant of the board

Hardware

Supported Features

The package is configured to support the following hardware:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

ADC

on-chip

adc

CLOCK

on-chip

clock_control

FLASH

on-chip

flash

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

I2C0

on-chip

i2c

I2C1

on-chip

i2c

MPU

on-chip

arch/arm

NVIC

on-chip

arch/arm

PWM

on-chip

pwm

RADIO

on-chip

Bluetooth, ieee802154

RTC

on-chip

system clock

SPI

on-chip

spi

UART

on-chip

serial

USB

on-chip

usb

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

Other hardware features are not supported by the Zephyr kernel.

Notably, this includes the PDM (microphone) interface.

Connections and IOs

The schematic 3 will tell you everything you need to know about the pins.

A convinience header mapping the Arduino pin names to their Zephyr pin numbers can be found in arduino_nano_33_ble_pins.h, if you link against the arduino_nano_33_ble_pins CMake library.

For your convience, two Kconfig options are added:

  1. BOARD_ARDUINO_NANO_33_BLE_INIT_SENSORS:

    This configuration option enables the internal I2C sensors.

  2. BOARD_ARDUINO_NANO_33_BLE_EN_USB_CONSOLE:

    This configuration option enables the USB CDC subsystem and the console, so that printk works.

Programming and Debugging

This board requires the Arduino variant of bossac. You will not be able to flash with the bossac included with the zephyr-sdk, or using shumatech’s mainline build.

You can get this variant of bossac with one of two ways:

  1. Building the binary from the Arduino source tree

  2. Downloading the Arduino IDE

    1. Install the board support package within the IDE

    2. Change your IDE preferences to provide verbose logging

    3. Build and flash a sample application, and read the logs to figure out where Arduino stored bossac.

Once you have a path to bossac, you can pass it as an argument to west:

west flash --bossac="<path to the arduino version of bossac>"

Flashing

Attach the board to your computer using the USB cable, and then

west build -b arduino_nano_33_ble samples/blinky

Double-tap the RESET button on your board. Your board should disconnect, reconnect, and there should be a pulsing orange LED near the USB port.

Then, you can flash the image using the above script.

You should see the the red LED blink.