nRF5 action!
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Anyone played around with Nordic's nRF52840 dongle? They're $10 each, and a few places have them in stock.
https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840-DongleNordic finally has a v1.0 product specification for the nRF52840, not just the silly v0.5 that they had posted for so long. http://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/pdf/nRF52840_PS_v1.0.pdf
It has 256K RAM and 1MB of flash. I'm having difficulty imagining which applications would require that much of either one. If it were free, that would be great, but I'm afraid the large RAM becomes an energy drain. For instance, it consumes 3.16µA with System ON, full 256 kB RAM retention, and wake on RTC.
On the other hand, it consumes 0.4uA of current if System OFF, no RAM retention, and wake on reset
It consumes 16.4ma if transmitting at full power (8dBm) with DC-DC engaged.
If compared to LoRa, it's going to lose on range. However, the question is: will it be good enough in a large or otherwise difficult home environment? The specs say it should be better than either nRF24L01 and nRF52832, which seem better suited to smaller dwellings. Maybe (?) the question can be answered with a couple of dongles.
@neverdie I want to, but only shop that can send me with free shipping (and not 75$ like the others) is Arrow, and it's not yet in stock there.
CDEByte sells some too now ... but with a small form factor & ceramic antenna, I'm afraid it will waste all the theoretical extra range... -
I guess maybe in your case the next best alternative would be the Fanstel nRF52840 modules, which should be drop-in upgrades to whatever PCB designs you may have had that used the Fanstel nRF52832 modules. I had previously posted a few:
https://www.openhardware.io/view/499/10-years-wireless-PIR-Sensor-on-just-one-set-of-3-AAs
https://www.openhardware.io/view/491/PA-LNA-nRF52832-ESP-LINK-Shield-for-Wemos-D1-Mini-ESP8266
https://www.openhardware.io/view/489/BT832X-Power-Amplified-nRF52832-Remote-Control-with-LNA
Fortunately, the remote control I posted would still consume zero current when not in use even with the nRF52840. :)I guess that PPI is unique to Nordic. I had previously supposed it was a part of the generic ARM chip design, but I didn't see it when I looked into the STM32 chips.
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Come to think of it: with so much flash and RAM, I bet the nRF52840 could easily run micro Python. Now that would be interesting!
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Come to think of it: with so much flash and RAM, I bet the nRF52840 could easily run micro Python. Now that would be interesting!
@neverdie
In fact it can.
Adafruit has a build of their Circuitpython (Micropython fork) for the nrf52832, and there's already an early alpha for the nrf52840.
As the 52840 has native USB, they can use Micropython as it was originally intended to be, with a virtual USB drive that contains all the user code files. -
@neverdie
In fact it can.
Adafruit has a build of their Circuitpython (Micropython fork) for the nrf52832, and there's already an early alpha for the nrf52840.
As the 52840 has native USB, they can use Micropython as it was originally intended to be, with a virtual USB drive that contains all the user code files. -
@uhrheber Can it run as a USB host? Because then (with a sex change) you could maybe plug it into a USB drive and have a nice little computer. :sunglasses:
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Anyone played around with Nordic's nRF52840 dongle? They're $10 each, and a few places have them in stock.
https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840-DongleNordic finally has a v1.0 product specification for the nRF52840, not just the silly v0.5 that they had posted for so long. http://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/pdf/nRF52840_PS_v1.0.pdf
It has 256K RAM and 1MB of flash. I'm having difficulty imagining which applications would require that much of either one. If it were free, that would be great, but I'm afraid the large RAM becomes an energy drain. For instance, it consumes 3.16µA with System ON, full 256 kB RAM retention, and wake on RTC.
On the other hand, it consumes 0.4uA of current if System OFF, no RAM retention, and wake on reset
It consumes 16.4ma if transmitting at full power (8dBm) with DC-DC engaged.
If compared to LoRa, it's going to lose on range. However, the question is: will it be good enough in a large or otherwise difficult home environment? The specs say it should be better than either nRF24L01 and nRF52832, which seem better suited to smaller dwellings. Maybe (?) the question can be answered with a couple of dongles.
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@scalz
I would be interested in any range testing in regard to this dongle. For ground it has whatever it is that it is plugged into. (PC, SBC, USB extention cable, etc) There will be a nRF52840 based dongle out soon. See picture above. This dongle will need to be programed over the SWD lines. No Segger on board this one..! -
I suppose plugging the Nordic dongle into a Raspberry Pi via USB would potentially make a powerful gateway with a very easy setup. :)
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Anyone know if the dongle has a USB bootloader on it so that you can upload a sketch over the USB?
[Edit: apparently, the answer is yes: http://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.nordic.infocenter.nrf52%2Fdita%2Fnrf52%2Fdevelopment%2Fnrf52840_dongle%2Fgetting_started.html ]
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A plug and play dongle.. now there's something. A controller could theoretically take care of all the work - a user just has to plugin the dongle and it flashes it, installs mysensors..
I read it can also support Zigbee and Bluetooth. Could it support Zigbee, bluetooth and MySensors at the same time?
Wow, plug that into a Pi Zero and you have a capable controller for a smart home.
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This looks like an Arduino-nano/pro-mini style device with an NRF51:
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Maybe this is old news, but it looks like Adafruit put together a nice board and software for the nRF2832. https://www.adafruit.com/product/3406
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I'd like to take a crack at prograamming the nRF52840. Has anyone here tried it? I'm not sure whether the software support for it is in place yet or not. How best to get started with it? As far as compiling and uploading code goes, do I just treat it the same as an nRF2832?
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I'd like to take a crack at prograamming the nRF52840. Has anyone here tried it? I'm not sure whether the software support for it is in place yet or not. How best to get started with it? As far as compiling and uploading code goes, do I just treat it the same as an nRF2832?
@neverdie I have ordered 10x nRF52832 and 2x nRF52840 from EBYTE (E73-xxxB/C). I will join you once I got them (they are on they way since 2 weeks). I'll also work together with ransyer to get new PCB's (the last we maybe together are for the ESP32).
I'm curious what distance I can get indoor with the BLE 4.2/5.0 (no extra radio) and if required, I will combine it with a LoRA RFM95 (that is also what our PCB's is made for RFM69/95 and CC1101).
I'm still working on the sensor with the 1,54" ePaper (where the ATMEGA328p is lost with its 32kB flash and even worse with the 2k RAM)this one will be tricky to solder (I'm trying to get something better to solder)
https://de.aliexpress.com/item/NRF52840-Bluetooth-5-0-240-mhz-RF-Transceiver-CDSENET-E73-2G4M08S1C-8dbm-Keramik-Antenne-BLE-4/32906661666.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.1d174c4dKW9mAo -
@neverdie I have ordered 10x nRF52832 and 2x nRF52840 from EBYTE (E73-xxxB/C). I will join you once I got them (they are on they way since 2 weeks). I'll also work together with ransyer to get new PCB's (the last we maybe together are for the ESP32).
I'm curious what distance I can get indoor with the BLE 4.2/5.0 (no extra radio) and if required, I will combine it with a LoRA RFM95 (that is also what our PCB's is made for RFM69/95 and CC1101).
I'm still working on the sensor with the 1,54" ePaper (where the ATMEGA328p is lost with its 32kB flash and even worse with the 2k RAM)this one will be tricky to solder (I'm trying to get something better to solder)
https://de.aliexpress.com/item/NRF52840-Bluetooth-5-0-240-mhz-RF-Transceiver-CDSENET-E73-2G4M08S1C-8dbm-Keramik-Antenne-BLE-4/32906661666.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.1d174c4dKW9mAo -
@heinzv said in nRF5 action!:
this one will be tricky to solder (I'm trying to get something better to solder)
https://de.aliexpress.com/item/NRF52840-Bluetooth-5-0-240-mhz-RF-Transceiver-CDSENET-E73-2G4M08S1C-8dbm-Keramik-Antenne-BLE-4/32906661666.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.1d174c4dKW9mAoAlready out of stock it seems, it's not possible to order them any more.
They seem to have both 32K crystal and inductances for DCDC, that's pretty convenient. -
The answer I got on the Sandeep library made it sound rather iffy as to whether it would work for the nRF52840: https://github.com/sandeepmistry/arduino-nRF5/issues/310
or that the coverage might be rather spotty.So, I think I may give mbed a try for programming the nRF52840, because mbed claims to support the nRF52840-DK. Also, I found what seems like a nice and simple youtube tutorial series for how to use mbed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP_zHbC_5eM
If I have success with mbed, I may circle back to the Sandeep library and the mysensors implementation, but I'd like to start with something solid, and it appears that mbed might be.
The other nice thing is that it appears mbed provides an abstraction layer which makes easy to program a whole range of different mcu's, incuding many of the stm32's.
Anyone here familiar with or tried mbed before?
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The answer I got on the Sandeep library made it sound rather iffy as to whether it would work for the nRF52840: https://github.com/sandeepmistry/arduino-nRF5/issues/310
or that the coverage might be rather spotty.So, I think I may give mbed a try for programming the nRF52840, because mbed claims to support the nRF52840-DK. Also, I found what seems like a nice and simple youtube tutorial series for how to use mbed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP_zHbC_5eM
If I have success with mbed, I may circle back to the Sandeep library and the mysensors implementation, but I'd like to start with something solid, and it appears that mbed might be.
The other nice thing is that it appears mbed provides an abstraction layer which makes easy to program a whole range of different mcu's, incuding many of the stm32's.
Anyone here familiar with or tried mbed before?
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Update:
I received some nRF52840 dongles. I confirmed with Nordic that the recommended way to program them over USB is to use nRF Connect v2.5.0 which contains the nRF Programmer v1.0.0-experimental.5 application. I tried that, but I may have somehow bricked my first dongle by not pressing reset first before the upload. Either that, or because my simple program didn't initialize the USB, maybe it can't be found for that reason (I suspect so).Luckily, I live not too far from Mouser. I should be receiving the nRF52840-DK today, so I figure that way I can unbrick the dongle.
Yesterday I played around with mbed on an nucleo board. Seems to work well (no bricking). Unfortunately, the dongle isn't an mbed device, so the methods above are required unless you program it with a DK or similar. The good news, though, is that the DK is an mbed board, so hopefully that will be smooth sailing. It turns out that USB is built into the nRF52840 chip, so it doesn't require a separate chip like a CP2102 to communicate over USB. I guess that can be good or bad depending on how your write your code.
