Laird Connectivity Sentrius™ MG100 Gateway

Overview

The Sentrius™ MG100 Gateway offers a compact, out of box Bluetooth to low power cellular gateway solution.

Based on the Pinnacle 100 socket modem, the Sentrius™ MG100 gateway captures data from any Bluetooth 5 modules or devices and sends it to the cloud via a global low power cellular (LTE-M/NB-IoT) connection. The MG100 seamlessly incorporates a powerful Cortex M4F controller, full Bluetooth 5 connectivity, and dual-mode LTE-M/NB-IoT capabilities. The MG100 has full regulatory and network certifications and End Device carrier approvals.

Develop your application directly on the integrated Cortex M4F microcontroller using Zephyr RTOS, enabling your application development with a secure, open source RTOS with more than just kernel services. Remotely debug your fleet of devices with the Memfault Platform 6. Take advantage of the Zephyr community and Laird Connectivity’s multi featured Out of Box (OOB) sample source code covering all aspects of the product’s capabilities and hardware interfaces. The MG100 also delivers complete antenna flexibility with internal or external antenna options available, and the optional battery backup provides uninterrupted reporting of remote Bluetooth sensor data.

More information about the board can be found at the MG100 website 1.

The MG100 hardware provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 7 ARM Cortex-M4F CPU, Sierra Wireless HL7800 2 and the following devices:

  • ADC

  • CLOCK

  • FLASH

  • GPIO

  • I2C

  • MPU

  • NVIC

  • PWM

  • RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4)

  • RTC

  • SPI

  • UART

  • WDT

  • QSPI

  • LIS3DH

  • HL7800

  • SD Card

MG100

Fig. 121 MG100 (450-00054-K1)

Hardware

Supported Features

The MG100 board configuration supports the following 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

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(M/S)

on-chip

spi

UART

on-chip

serial

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

QSPI

on-chip

qspi/MX25R64(8MB)

LIS3DH

I2C(M)

sensor/lis3dh

HL7800

UART

HL7800 modem driver

SDMMC

SPI(M)

SD Card via SPI

See MG100 website 1 for a complete list of MG100 hardware features.

Connections and IOs

LED

  • LED1 (red) = P1.7

  • LED2 (blue) = P1.6

  • LED3 (green) = P1.5

Push buttons

  • BUTTON1 = P0.3

External flash memory

A 64Mbit external flash memory part is available for storage of application images and data. Refer to the Macronix MX25R6435F datasheet 4 for further details.

The flash memory is connected to the on-board QSPI device controller.

  • MX25R64 = QSPI

SCK = P0.19 IO0 = P0.20 IO1 = P0.21 IO2 = P0.22 IO3 = P0.23 CSN = P0.17

LIS3DH Motion Sensor

Motion sensor to detect if the gateway moves.

IRQ IO = P0.28 I2C SDA = P0.26 I2C SCL = P0.27

SD Card

SD card used to store large amounts of data.

SPI CS = P0.29 SPI SCK = P1.09 SPI MOSI = P0.11 SPI MISO = P0.12

Programming and Debugging

Applications for the mg100 board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way. (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details)

The Laird Connectivity USB-SWD Programming Kit 5 contains all the necessary hardware to enable programming and debugging an MG100.

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.

Note

On the MG100, the USB connector should be used to access the UART console.

$ minicom -D <tty_device> -b 115200

Replace <tty_device> with the port where the board MG100 can be found. For example, under Linux, /dev/ttyUSB0.

Then build and flash the application in the usual way.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b mg100 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.

Software

MG100 Out-of-Box Demo Software

The MG100 ships with an out of the box software demo. Check out the BLE Gateway OOB Demo 3 source code and documentation.

Testing Bluetooth on the MG100

Many of the Bluetooth examples will work on the MG100. Try them out:

Testing the LEDs and buttons in the MG100

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/arm/mg100/mg100.dts.

References

1(1,2)

https://www.lairdconnect.com/iot-devices/iot-gateways/sentrius-mg100-gateway-lte-mnb-iot-and-bluetooth-5

2

https://source.sierrawireless.com/devices/hl-series/hl7800/#sthash.641qTTwA.dpbs

3

https://github.com/LairdCP/Pinnacle-100-Firmware-Manifest

4

https://www.macronix.com/Lists/Datasheet/Attachments/7913/MX25R6435F,%20Wide%20Range,%2064Mb,%20v1.5.pdf

5

https://www.lairdconnect.com/wireless-modules/programming-kits/usb-swd-programming-kit

6

https://docs.memfault.com/docs/mcu/pinnacle-100-guide

7

https://www.nordicsemi.com/products/nrf52840