nRF52840 Development Board Basics

Wireless & IoT Bluetooth
1

Hi,

I recently just purchased one of the SparkFun Pro nRF52840 Mini boards from a local supplier in Australia, and just had a few questions on how to best go about using it for a wearable sensor device university project. I haven’t dealt with embedded system programming much before or BLE technology, so I am a bit unsure on a few things.

Specifically, my questions are as follows:

  1. Is the available Nordic Semiconductor SDK fully usable with this board upon making the changes noted in the software development guide (e.g. revision of make files, inclusion of board-specific header file etc.)?

  2. If I were to then take the device one step further and use the nRF52840 SoC (i.e. the Raytac MDBT50Q-P1M module) within my own custom circuitry, what sort of programming changes would this likely require? Could I use much of the same code and make some simple refinements? I’m expecting to essentially consolidate the design of the system and use only some of the available pins for a few sensor units.

  3. Can the board be programmed through BT? Or is USB the main option? I noticed that in the adafruit-nrfutil and Python 3 section (‘Using the Bootloader’) it says the updating can be completed over either serial or Bluetooth, and I read in the nRF52840 datasheet that the SoC has Over-The-Air DFU capability (not too sure if this carries over to broaderd system programming…).

Apologies if any of the above is not quite correct or even silly. Just trying to get a good idea before I delve too far into it.

Thanks!

2

Hi KT_QUT_20,

  • - Theoretically yes but you will probably run into some hardware limitations as there are pins on the nRF52840 that are not broken out on the Pro nRF Mini. I would refer to the [[schematic](https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/learn_tutorials/8/2/0/nrf52840-breakout-mdbt50q-v10.pdf) and board files (available to download from the "Documents" tab on the product page) to confirm which functionality you may not be able to use with the Nordic SDK.
  • - Unfortunately, we do not have any information available to help you with custom boards/code so you will need to do some research on your own to figure this out. The [[Nordic DevZone](https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/) and [[Nordic Infocenter](https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp) will be the two best resources for researching that.
  • - While the adafruit-nrfutil does work for updating an nRF chip or sending DFU via Bluetooth, the bootloader shipped on the SparkFun Pro nRF Mini is serial only. To update the board via Bluetooth, you would need to load a different bootloader onto the nRF52840 to take advantage of that capability. Again, this is beyond the scope of our support here so the above links would be the two places I would recommend starting learning about how to go about that.
    • ](https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp)

    I hope this helps you get started working with the Pro nRF52840 Mini.](https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/)](https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/learn_tutorials/8/2/0/nrf52840-breakout-mdbt50q-v10.pdf)

    3

    Thanks for that Mark! I’m looking at simply starting off with the Pro nRF Mini board and going from there :slight_smile: