nRF51 DK

Overview

The nRF51 Development Kit (PCA10028) 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

More information about the board can be found at the nRF51 DK website [1]. The nRF51 Development Kit User Guide [2] contains the processor’s information and the datasheet.

Hardware

nRF51 DK 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 nrf51dk/nrf51822 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 have not been enabled yet for this board. See nRF51 DK website [1] and nRF51 Development Kit User Guide [2] for a complete list of nRF51 Development Kit board hardware features.

Connections and IOs

LED

LED1 (green) = P0.21
LED2 (green) = P0.22
LED3 (green) = P0.23
LED4 (green) = P0.24

Push buttons

BUTTON1 = SW1 = P0.17
BUTTON2 = SW2 = P0.18
BUTTON3 = SW3 = P0.19
BUTTON4 = SW4 = P0.20
BOOT = SW5 = 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 DK 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 nrf51dk/nrf51822 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 and buttons in the nRF51 DK

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

samples/basic/blinky
samples/basic/button

You can build and flash the examples to make sure Zephyr is running correctly on your board. The button and LED definitions can be found in boards/nordic/nrf51dk/nrf51dk_nrf51822.dts.