EFR32 BRD4180A (SLWRB4180A)

Overview

The EFR32MG21 Mighty Gecko Radio Board is one of the two radio boards delivered with EFR32-SLWSTK6006A Website. It contains a Wireless System-On-Chip from the EFR32MG21 family built on an ARM Cortex®-M33F processor with excellent low power capabilities.

SLWRB4180A Mighty Gecko Radio Board

Fig. 115 SLWRB4180A (image courtesy of Silicon Labs)

The BRD4180A a.k.a. SLWRB4180A radio board plugs into the Wireless Starter Kit Mainboard BRD4001A and is supported as one of EFR32 Radio Boards.

Hardware

  • EFR32MG21A020F1024IM32 Mighty Gecko SoC

  • CPU core: ARM Cortex®-M33 with FPU

  • Flash memory: 1024 kB

  • RAM: 96 kB

  • Transmit power: up to +20 dBm

  • Operation frequency: 2.4 GHz

  • Crystals for LFXO (32.768 kHz) and HFXO (38.4 MHz).

For more information about the EFR32MG21 SoC and BRD4180A board, refer to these documents:

Supported Features

The board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

MPU

on-chip

memory protection unit

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

SYSTICK

on-chip

systick

COUNTER

on-chip

rtcc

FLASH

on-chip

flash memory

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

I2C

on-chip

i2c port-polling

WATCHDOG

on-chip

watchdog

Other hardware features are currently not supported by the port.

Connections and IOs

In the following table, the column Name contains Pin names. For example, PA2 means Pin number 2 on PORTA, as used in the board’s datasheets and manuals.

Name

Function

Usage

PB0

GPIO

LED0

PB1

GPIO

LED1

PD2

GPIO

Push Button PB0

PD3

GPIO

Push Button PB1

PD4

GPIO

Board Controller Enable EFM_BC_EN

PA5

USART1_TX

UART Console EFM_BC_TX US1_TX

PA6

USART1_RX

UART Console EFM_BC_RX US1_RX

The default configuration can be found in the defconfig file:

boards/arm/efr32_radio/efr32_radio_brd4180a_defconfig

System Clock

The EFR32MG21 SoC is configured to use the 38.4 MHz external oscillator on the board.

Serial Port

The EFR32MG21 SoC has three USARTs. USART0 is connected to the board controller and is used for the console.

Programming and Debugging

Please refer to Programming and Debugging EFR32 Radio Board for details on the supported debug interfaces.

Flashing

Connect the BRD4001A board with a mounted BRD4180A radio module to your host computer using the USB port.

Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b efr32_radio_brd4180a samples/hello_world
west flash

Open a serial terminal (minicom, putty, etc.) with the following settings:

  • Speed: 115200

  • Data: 8 bits

  • Parity: None

  • Stop bits: 1

Reset the board and you should see the following message in the terminal:

Hello World! efr32_radio_brd4180a