CTHINGS.CO Connectivity Card nRF52840

Overview

The Connectivity Card nRF52840 enables BLE and IEEE 802.15.4 connectivity over mPCIe or M.2 using USB port with on-board nRF52840 SoC.

This board has following features:

  • CLOCK

  • FLASH

  • GPIO

  • MPU

  • NVIC

  • RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4)

  • RTC

  • USB

  • WDT

CTCC nRF52840 mPCIe

ctcc/nrf52840 mPCie board

CTCC nRF52840 M.2

ctcc/nrf52840 M.2 board

More information about the board can be found at the ctcc_nrf52840 Website [1] and for SoC information: Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter [2].

Hardware

The ctcc/nrf52840 board target has one external oscillator of the 32.768 kHz.

Supported Features

The ctcc/nrf52840 board target 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

RADIO

on-chip

Bluetooth, ieee802154

RTC

on-chip

system clock

USB

on-chip

usb

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

Connections and IOs

LED

Note that board does not have on-board LEDs, however it exposes LED signals on mPCIe/M.2 pins.

  • LED1 = P0.23

  • LED2 = P0.22

Programming and Debugging

Applications for the ctcc/nrf52840 board target can be built in the usual way (see Building an Application for more details).

Flashing

The board supports the following programming options:

  1. Using an external debug probe

  2. Using MCUboot with DFU support

Option 1: Using an External Debug Probe

Connectivity Card can be programmed using an external debug probe (Segger J-Link) by connecting to on-board SWD test pads.

For Segger J-Link debug probes, 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 Console over USB CDC ACM application which prints out logs on emulated USB port.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b ctcc/nrf52840 samples/subsys/usb/console
west flash

Debugging

The ctcc/nrf52840 board target does not have an on-board J-Link debug IC, however instructions from the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page also apply to this board, with the additional step of connecting an external debugger.

Option 2: Using MCUboot with DFU support

It is also possible to use the MCUboot bootloader with DFU support to flash Zephyr applications. You need to flash MCUboot with DFU support and fill in slot0 with some application one-time using Option 1. Then you can re-flash an application using DFU utility by loading images to slot1. Note, it’s not possible to have only MCUboot and load directly software to slot0 due to DFU implementation in Zephyr, which for present slot0 and slot1 in flash map, it assumes only slot1 partition as writeable.

Install dfu-util first and make sure MCUboot’s imgtool is available for signing your binary for MCUboot as described on Signing Binaries.

Next, do the one-time setup to flash MCUboot with DFU support. We’ll assume you’ve cloned the MCUboot [3] as a submodule when initializing Zephyr repositories using West (Zephyr’s meta-tool) tool.

  1. Compile MCUboot as a Zephyr application with DFU support.

    west build -b ctcc/nrf52840 -d build/mcuboot mcuboot/boot/zephyr -- -DCONFIG_BOOT_USB_DFU_WAIT=y

  2. Flash it onto the board as described in Option 1.

  3. Flash other Zephyr application to fill in slot0 e.g:

    # From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b ctcc/nrf52840 -d build/dfu samples/subsys/usb/dfu -- -DCONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=y -DCONFIG_MCUBOOT_SIGNATURE_KEY_FILE=\"path/to/mcuboot/boot/root-rsa-2048.pem\"

You can now flash a Zephyr application to the board using DFU util. As an example we’ll use the Console over USB CDC ACM sample.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b ctcc/nrf52840 samples/subsys/usb/console -- -DCONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=y -DCONFIG_MCUBOOT_SIGNATURE_KEY_FILE=\"path/to/mcuboot/boot/root-rsa-2048.pem\"
west flash

Note

In all examples it is assumed to use default root-rsa-2048.pem file from mcuboot/boot directory. Providing certificate in build args produces signed binary automatically. Do not use this certificate in your production firmware!

  1. Plug in ctcc/nrf52840 card to mPCIe/M.2 slot or use mPCIe/M.2 adapter to USB and plug such adapter to USB port.

    You should see NordicSemiconductor MCUBOOT or NordicSemiconductor Zephyr DFU sample (if you flashed dfu sample to slot0) device once plugging it into host USB port. You can check that on Linux system by entering lsusb command.

    To check if DFU device is visible you can enter sudo dfu-util -l command. Once the device is visible you can flash Zephyr image using DFU util: sudo dfu-util --alt 1 --download build/zephyr/zephyr.signed.bin

References