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Actinius Icarus Bee

Overview

Icarus Bee

Icarus Bee (nRF9160 Bee)

The Icarus Bee is a cellular IoT board in Bee/xBee form factor. It is built around Nordic Semi’s nRF9160 modem and combines LTE-M, NB-IoT, GPS, accelerometer, SPI Flash, RGB LED, Button, as well as an eSIM and a nano SIM connector.

The main uController is the Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160, with ARM Cortex-M33F CPU, ARMv8-M Security Extension and the following devices (provided directly by Nordic):

  • ADC

  • CLOCK

  • FLASH

  • GPIO

  • I2C

  • MPU

  • NVIC

  • PWM

  • RTC

  • Segger RTT (RTT Console)

  • SPI

  • UARTE

  • WDT

  • IDAU

Icarus Bee w/ Pinouts

Icarus Bee w/ Pinouts

Icarus Bee

Internal Pinouts

Hardware

The detailed information about the on-board hardware can be found at the Icarus Bee Product Website [2].

Supported Features

The actinius_icarus_bee 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

SPI(M/S)

on-chip

spi

SPU

on-chip

system protection

UARTE

on-chip

serial

ACCEL

st

lis2dh

SIM selection

The sim choice (eSIM or nano-SIM) can be configured in Devicetree by adjusting the sim property in the sim_select node.

Security components

  • Implementation Defined Attribution Unit (IDAU [1]). The IDAU is implemented with the System Protection Unit and is used to define secure and non-secure memory maps. By default, all of the memory space (Flash, SRAM, and peripheral address space) is defined to be secure accessible only.

  • Secure boot.

Building Secure/Non-Secure Zephyr applications

The process requires the following steps:

  1. Build the Secure Zephyr application using -DBOARD=actinius_icarus_bee.

  2. Build the Non-Secure Zephyr application using -DBOARD=actinius_icarus_bee/ns.

  3. Merge the two binaries together.

If you are using Segger Embedded Studio v4.18 or later, the two binaries are built, merged, and burned automatically, unless you have disabled the feature.

When building a Secure/Non-Secure application, the Secure application will have to set the IDAU (SPU) configuration to allow Non-Secure access to all CPU resources utilized by the Non-Secure application firmware. SPU configuration shall take place before jumping to the Non-Secure application.

More information can be found in the Icarus Bee Product Website [2] or the Actinius Documentation Portal [3].

References