Particle Argon

Overview

The Particle Argon is a Wi-Fi enabled development board with a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 for mesh support and an ESP32 for Wi-Fi. The board was developed by Particle Industries and has a SWD connector on it for programming.

It is equipped with a onboard LIPO circuit and conforms to the Adafruit Feather formfactor.

The Particle Argon provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 ARM® Cortex®-M4F SoC with an integrated 2.4 GHz transceiver supporting Bluetooth® Low Energy and IEEE® 802.15.4.

For more information about the Particle Argon board:

Hardware

On the front of the board are RGB-LED, LED and LIPO circuitry. The RGB-LED is controlled by the nRF52840 via GPIO pins.

Fig. 131 Particle Argon (Credit: Particle Industries)

Power supply

The board is optimized for low power applications and supports two power source configurations: battery and micro USB connector.

It contains circuitry for LIPO usage and can be charged via the USB port.

Supported Features

The particle_argon board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface	Controller	Driver/Component
NVIC	on-chip	nested vectored interrupt controller
RTC	on-chip	system clock
UART	on-chip	serial port
I2C	on-chip	i2c
SPI	on-chip	spi
GPIO	on-chip	gpio
FLASH	on-chip	flash
RADIO	on-chip	Bluetooth

Other hardware features are not supported by the Zephyr kernel.

Connections and IOs

Please see the Argon Datasheet for header pin assignments, which are common to all Feather-compatible Particle boards. Some peripherals are available to applications through DTS overlay include directives:

mesh_feather_i2c1_twi1.dtsi exposes TWI1 on labeled Feather SDA1/SCL1 pins
mesh_feather_spi_spi1.dtsi exposes SPI1 on labeled Feather SPI pins
mesh_feather_spi_spi3.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI pins
mesh_feather_spi1_spi3.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI1 pins
mesh_feather_uart1_rtscts.dtsi adds hardware flow control to labeled Feather UART pins

LED

LED0 (blue)
LED1 (red)
LED2 (green)
LED3 (blue)

Push buttons

SW0 via MODE
SW1 via RESET

I2C

TWI0 enabled on labeled header (SDA/SCL)
TWI1 selectable with overlay (SDA1/SCL1)

SPI

SPI0 disabled due to TWI0 conflict
SPI1 selectable with overlay (SPI)
SPI2 internal to 32 Mb CFI flash chip
SPI3 selectable with overlay (SPI or SPI1)

UART

UARTE0 enabled RX/TX on labeled header (UART1); add RTS/CTS with overlay
UARTE1 internal to ESP32

Programming and Debugging

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

Flashing

Build and flash an application in the usual way, for example:

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b particle_argon samples/basic/blinky
west flash

Debugging

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b particle_argon samples/hello_world
west debug

Testing the LEDs and buttons

There are 2 samples that allow you to test that the buttons (switches) and LEDs on the board are working properly with Zephyr:

You can build and flash the examples to make sure Zephyr is running correctly on your board.