Working with nRF9160 DK

The nRF9160 DK is a hardware development platform used to design and develop application firmware on the nRF9160 LTE Cat-M1 and Cat-NB1 System in Package (SiP). See the nRF9160 DK Hardware guide for detailed information about the nRF9160 DK hardware. To get started with the nRF9160 DK, follow the steps in the nRF9160 DK Getting Started guide.

Board controller

The nRF9160 DK contains an nRF52840 SoC that is used to route some of the nRF9160 SiP pins to different components on the DK, such as LEDs and buttons, and to specific pins of the nRF52840 SoC itself. For a complete list of all the routing options available, see the nRF9160 DK board control section in the nRF9160 DK User Guide.

The nRF52840 SoC on the DK comes preprogrammed with a firmware. If you need to restore the original firmware at some point, download the nRF9160 DK board controller firmware from the nRF9160 DK product page. To program the HEX file, use nrfjprog (which is part of the nRF Command Line Tools).

If you want to route some pins differently from what is done in the preprogrammed firmware, program the Hello World sample instead of the preprogrammed firmware. Build the sample (located under ncs/zephyr/samples/hello_world) for the nrf9160dk_nrf52840 board. To change the routing options, enable or disable the corresponding devicetree nodes for that board as needed. See Board controller firmware for detailed information.

Modem firmware

You can update the modem firmware in an nRF9160 DK with multiple methods. See Updating the nRF9160 cellular modem for more information.

Build targets

In Zephyr, nRF9160 DK is divided into two different build targets:

  • nrf9160dk_nrf9160 for firmware in the secure domain

  • nrf9160dk_nrf9160_ns for firmware in the non-secure domain

Note

In nRF Connect SDK releases before v1.6.1, the build target nrf9160dk_nrf9160_ns was named nrf9160dk_nrf9160ns.

Make sure to select a suitable build target when building your application.

Building and programming

See Building and programming an application for information on building and programming samples on nRF9160 DK.

Board revisions

nRF9160 DK v0.14.0 and later has additional hardware features that are not available on earlier versions of the DK:

  • External flash memory

  • I/O expander

To make use of these features, specify the board revision when building your application.

Note

You must specify the board revision only if you use features that are not available in all board revisions. If you do not specify a board revision, the firmware is built for the default revision (v0.7.0). Newer revisions are compatible with the default revision.

To specify the board revision, append it to the build target when building. For example, when building a non-secure application for nRF9160 DK v1.0.0, use nrf9160dk_nrf9106ns@1.0.0 as build target.

When building with SEGGER Embedded Studio, specify the board revision as additional CMake option (see Providing CMake options for instructions). For example, for nRF9160 DK v1.0.0, add the following CMake option:

-DBOARD=nrf9160dk_nrf9160_ns@1.0.0

See Building for a board revision and Additional hardware in v0.14.0+ for more information.

Available drivers, libraries, and samples

See the Drivers, Libraries, and nRF9160 samples sections and the respective repository folders for up-to-date information.