The latest development version of this page may be more current than this released 1.14.1 version.

Particle Boron¶

Overview¶

The Particle Boron is a cellular-enabled development board with a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 for mesh support and an LTE or 2G/3G modem. The board was developed by Particle Industries and has a SWD connector on it for programming.

It is equipped with a onboard LIPO circuit and conforms to the Adafruit Feather formfactor.

The Particle Boron board provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 ARM® Cortex®-M4F SoC with an integrated 2.4 GHz transceiver supporting Bluetooth® Low Energy and IEEE® 802.15.4.

For more information about the Particle Boron board:

Hardware¶

On the front of the board are RGB-LED, LED and LIPO circuitry. The RGB-LED is controlled by the nRF52840 via GPIO pins.

Particle Boron (Credit: Particle Industries)

Power supply¶

The board is optimized for low power applications and supports two power source configurations: battery and micro USB connector.

It contains circuitry for LIPO usage and can be charged via the USB port.

Supported Features¶

The particle_boron board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface	Controller	Driver/Component
NVIC	on-chip	nested vectored interrupt controller
RTC	on-chip	system clock
UART	on-chip	serial port
I2C	on-chip	i2c
SPI	on-chip	spi
GPIO	on-chip	gpio
FLASH	on-chip	flash
RADIO	on-chip	Bluetooth

Other hardware features are not supported by the Zephyr kernel.

Connections and IOs¶

Please see the Boron Datasheet for header pin assignments, which are common to all Feather-compatible Particle boards. Some peripherals are available to applications through DTS overlay include directives:

mesh_feather_spi_spi3.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI pins
mesh_feather_spi1_spi3.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI1 pins
mesh_feather_uart1_rtscts.dtsi adds hardware flow control to labeled Feather UART pins

LED¶

LED0 (blue)
LED1 (red)
LED2 (green)
LED3 (blue)

Push buttons¶

SW0 via MODE
SW1 via RESET

I2C¶

TWI0 enabled on labeled header (SDA/SCL)
TWI1 enabled for internal power management ICs

SPI¶

SPI0 disabled due to TWI0 conflict
SPI1 disabled due to TWI1 conflict
SPI2 internal to 32 Mb CFI flash chip
SPI3 selectable with overlay (SPI or SPI1)

UART¶

UARTE0 enabled RX/TX on labeled header (UART1); add RTS/CTS with overlay
UARTE1 internal to u-blox cellular modem

Programming and Debugging¶

Applications for the particle_boron board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way (see Build an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Flashing¶

Build and flash an application in the usual way, for example:

# On Linux/macOS
cd $ZEPHYR_BASE/samples/basic/blinky
mkdir build && cd build

# On Windows
cd %ZEPHYR_BASE%\samples\basic\blinky
mkdir build & cd build

# Use cmake to configure a Ninja-based build system:
cmake -GNinja -DBOARD=particle_boron ..

# Now run ninja on the generated build system:
ninja
ninja flash

Debugging¶

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# On Linux/macOS
cd $ZEPHYR_BASE/samples/hello_world
# If you already made a build directory (build) and ran cmake, just 'cd build' instead.
mkdir build && cd build

# On Windows
cd %ZEPHYR_BASE%\samples\hello_world
# If you already made a build directory (build) and ran cmake, just 'cd build' instead.
mkdir build & cd build

# Use cmake to configure a Ninja-based build system:
cmake -GNinja -DBOARD=particle_boron ..

# Now run ninja on the generated build system:
ninja debug

Testing the LEDs and buttons¶

There are 2 samples that allow you to test that the buttons (switches) and LEDs on the board are working properly with Zephyr:

You can build and flash the examples to make sure Zephyr is running correctly on your board.