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u-blox EVK NINA-B40x

Overview

The u-blox NINA-B4 Evaluation Kit hardware is a Bluetooth low energy module based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52833 ARM Cortex-M4F CPU and has support for the following features:

  • ADC

  • CLOCK

  • FLASH

  • GPIO

  • I2C

  • MPU

  • NVIC

  • PWM

  • RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy)

  • RTC

  • Segger RTT (RTT Console)

  • SPI

  • UART

  • USB

  • WDT

../../../../_images/EVK-NINA-B406_Top_web.png

EVK NINA-B4

More information about the NINA-B4 module and the EVK-NINA-B4 can be found at NINA-B40 product page 1 and EVK-NINA-B4 product page 2.

Supported Features

The ubx_evkninab4_nrf52833 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 low energy

RTC

on-chip

system clock

RTT

Segger

console

SPI(M/S)

on-chip

spi

UART

on-chip

serial

USB

on-chip

usb

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

Other hardware features are not supported by the Zephyr kernel. See EVK-NINA-B4 product page 2 and NINA-B40 Data Sheet 3 for a complete list of EVK NINA-B4 hardware features.

Connections and IOs

LED

  • LED0 (red) = P0.13

  • LED1 (green) = P1.01

  • LED2 (blue) = P1.00

Push buttons

  • BUTTON1 = SW1 = P1.01 (Shared with green LED)

  • BUTTON2 = SW2 = P0.02

General information on module pin numbering

The numbering of the pins on the module and EVK do not follow the GPIO numbering on the nRF52833 SoC. Please see the NINA-B40 Data Sheet 3 for information on how to map NINA-B40 pins to the pin numbering on the nRF52833 SoC.

The reason for this is the u-blox module family concept where different modules share the same pinout and can be interchanged, see NINA module family Nested design 4.

Programming and Debugging

Applications for the ubx_evkninab4_nrf52833 board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details); however, the standard debugging targets are not currently available.

Flashing

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.

Open a terminal program to the USB Serial Port installed when connecting the board and listen for output.

Settings: 115200, 8N1, no flow control.

Then build and flash the application in the usual way.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b ubx_evknina4_nrf52833 samples/hello_world
west flash

Debugging

Refer to the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to learn about debugging boards containing a Nordic Semiconductor chip with a Segger IC.

Testing the LEDs and buttons in the EVK NINA-B40x

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/ubx_evkninab4_nrf52833/ubx_evkninab4_nrf52833.dts.

Note that the buttons on the EVK-NINA-B4 are marked SW1 and SW2, which are named sw0 and sw1 in the dts file. Also note that the SW1 button and the green LED are connected on HW level.

Using UART1

The following approach can be used when an application needs to use more than one UART for connecting peripheral devices:

  1. Add device tree overlay file to the main directory of your application:

    $ cat ubx_evk_ninab4nrf52833.overlay
&uart1 {
  compatible = "nordic,nrf-uarte";
  current-speed = <115200>;
  status = "okay";
  tx-pin = <14>;
  rx-pin = <16>;
};

    In the overlay file above, pin P0.16 is used for RX and P0.14 is used for TX

  2. Use the UART1 as device_get_binding("UART_1")

Overlay file naming

The file has to be named <board>.overlay and placed in the app main directory to be picked up automatically by the device tree compiler.

Selecting the pins

To select the pin numbers for tx-pin and rx-pin:

tx-pin = <pin_no>

Open the data sheet for the NINA-B4 at NINA-B40 Data Sheet 3, Section 3 ‘Pin definition’. In the table 7 select the pins marked ‘GPIO_xx’. Note that pins marked as ‘Radio sensitive pin’ can only be used in under-10KHz applications. They are not suitable for 115200 speed of UART.

Translate ‘Pin’ into number for Device tree by using the following formula:

pin_no = b\*32 + a

where a and b are from the Pin value in the table (Pb.a). For example, for P0.1, pin_no = 1 and for P1.0, pin_no = 32.