nRF51 Dongle
Overview
The nRF51 Dongle (PCA10031) hardware provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 ARM Cortex-M0 CPU and the following devices:
ADC
CLOCK
FLASH
GPIO
I2C
NVIC
RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy)
RTC
Segger RTT (RTT Console)
SPI
UART
WDT
nRF51 Dongle (Credit: Nordic Semiconductor)
More information about the board can be found at the nRF51 Dongle website [1]. The Nordic Semiconductor TechDocs [2] contains the processor’s information and the datasheet.
Hardware
nRF51 Dongle has two external oscillators. The frequency of the slow clock is 32.768 kHz. The frequency of the main clock is 16 MHz.
Supported Features
The nrf51dongle/nrf51822 board configuration supports the following nRF51 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 |
NVIC |
on-chip |
arch/arm |
RADIO |
on-chip |
Bluetooth |
RTC |
on-chip |
system clock |
RTT |
Segger |
console |
SPI(M/S) |
on-chip |
spi |
UART |
on-chip |
serial |
WDT |
on-chip |
watchdog |
Other hardware features have not been enabled yet for this board. See nRF51 Dongle website [1] and Nordic Semiconductor TechDocs [2] for a complete list of nRF51 Dongle hardware features.
Connections and IOs
LED
LED1 (red) = P0.21
LED1 (green) = P0.22
LED1 (blue) = P0.23
Programming and Debugging
Flashing
Follow the instructions in the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to install and configure all the necessary software. Further information can be found in Flashing. Then 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.
First, run your favorite terminal program to listen for output.
$ minicom -D <tty_device> -b 115200
Replace <tty_device> with the port where the board nRF51 Dongle
can be found. For example, under Linux, /dev/ttyACM0.
Then build and flash the application in the usual way.
# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b nrf51dongle/nrf51822 samples/hello_world
west flash
Debugging
Refer to the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to learn about debugging Nordic boards with a Segger IC.
Testing the LEDs on the nRF51 Dongle
Build and flash the Blinky sample to test that the onboard LED is working properly with Zephyr.