nRF51 Dongle

Overview

The nRF51 Dongle (PCA10031) hardware provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 ARM Cortex-M0 CPU and the following devices:

  • ADC

  • CLOCK

  • FLASH

  • GPIO

  • I2C

  • NVIC

  • RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy)

  • RTC

  • Segger RTT (RTT Console)

  • SPI

  • UART

  • WDT

nRF51 Dongle

nRF51 Dongle (Credit: Nordic Semiconductor)

More information about the board can be found at the nRF51 Dongle website 1. The Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter 2 contains the processor’s information and the datasheet.

Hardware

nRF51 Dongle has two external oscillators. The frequency of the slow clock is 32.768 kHz. The frequency of the main clock is 16 MHz.

Supported Features

The nrf51dongle_nrf51422 board configuration supports the following nRF51 hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

ADC

on-chip

adc

CLOCK

on-chip

clock_control

FLASH

on-chip

flash

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

I2C(M)

on-chip

i2c

NVIC

on-chip

arch/arm

RADIO

on-chip

Bluetooth

RTC

on-chip

system clock

RTT

Segger

console

SPI(M/S)

on-chip

spi

UART

on-chip

serial

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

Other hardware features are not supported by the Zephyr kernel. See nRF51 Dongle website 1 and Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter 2 for a complete list of nRF51 Dongle hardware features.

Connections and IOs

LED

  • LED1 (red) = P0.21

  • LED1 (green) = P0.22

  • LED1 (blue) = P0.23

Push buttons

  • BOOT = SW1 = boot/reset

Programming and Debugging

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).

Here is an 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 board nRF51 Dongle can be found. For example, under Linux, /dev/ttyACM0.

Then build and flash the application in the usual way.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nrf51dongle_nrf51422 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.

Testing the LEDs on the nRF51 Dongle

Build and flash the Blinky sample to test that the onboard LED is working properly with Zephyr.