CTHINGS.CO Connectivity Card

Overview

Connectivity Cards come with either M.2 or mPCIe form factor with various SoCs, enabling different radio interfaces.

  • The Connectivity Card nRF52840 enables BLE and IEEE 802.15.4 over mPCIe or M.2 using USB device with on-board nRF52840 SoC

  • The Connectivity Card nRF9161 enables LTE-M/NB-IoT and DECT NR+ over mPCIe or M.2 using on-board USB-UART converter

Connectivity Card has following features:

  • CLOCK

  • FLASH

  • GPIO

  • MPU

  • NVIC

  • RADIO (Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4) (only nRF52840)

  • RADIO (LTE-M/NB-IoT and DECT NR+) (only nRF9161)

  • RTC

  • USB (only nRF52840)

  • UARTE (only nRF9161)

  • WDT

CTCC nRF52840 mPCIe

ctcc/nrf52840 mPCie board

CTCC nRF52840 M.2

ctcc/nrf52840 M.2 board

CTCC nRF9161 mPCIe

ctcc/nrf9161 mPCIe board

More information about the board can be found at the Connectivity Cards Website [1] and for SoC information: Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter [2].

Hardware

  • The ctcc/nrf52840 board target has one external oscillator of the 32.768 kHz.

  • The ctcc/nrf9161 board target has one external SPI NOR 64Mbit memory and one on-board USB-UART converter (CP210X).

Supported Features

The ctcc/nrf52840 board target supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

CLOCK

on-chip

clock_control

FLASH

on-chip

flash

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

MPU

on-chip

arch/arm

NVIC

on-chip

arch/arm

RADIO

on-chip

Bluetooth, ieee802154

RTC

on-chip

system clock

USB

on-chip

usb

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

The ctcc/nrf9161 board target supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

CLOCK

on-chip

clock_control

FLASH

on-chip

flash

FLASH

external

spi

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

MPU

on-chip

arch/arm

NVIC

on-chip

arch/arm

RADIO

on-chip

LTE-M/NB-IoT, DECT NR+

SPI(M/S)

on-chip

spi

SPU

on-chip

system protection

UARTE

on-chip

serial

RTC

on-chip

system clock

WDT

on-chip

watchdog

Connections and IOs

LED

Note that boards do not have on-board LEDs, however they expose LED signals on mPCIe/M.2 pins.

nRF52840:

  • LED1 = P0.23

  • LED2 = P0.22

nRF9161:

  • LED1 = P0.11

  • LED2 = P0.12

Programming and Debugging

Applications for ctcc boards can be built in the usual way (see Building an Application for more details).

Flashing

The board supports the following programming options:

  1. Using an external debug probe

  2. Using MCUboot [3] with MCUmgr support

Below instructions are provided for ctcc/nrf52840, to use nrf9161 target, the USB device configs have to be replaced with UART configurations.

Option 1: Using an External Debug Probe

Connectivity Card can be programmed using an external debug probe (Segger J-Link) by connecting to on-board SWD test pads.

For Segger J-Link debug probes, 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 Console over USB CDC ACM application which prints out logs on emulated USB port.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b ctcc/nrf52840 samples/subsys/usb/console
west flash

Option 2: Using MCUboot with MCUmgr support

It is also possible to use the MCUboot bootloader with MCUmgr support to flash Zephyr applications.

Install a MCUmgr-compatible tool from supported list and make sure MCUboot’s imgtool is available for signing your binary for MCUboot as described on Signing Binaries.

  1. Compile MCUboot as a Zephyr application with MCUmgr support.

    To build the MCUboot:

    west build -b ctcc/nrf52840 -d build/mcuboot mcuboot/boot/zephyr

  2. Flash it onto the board as described in Option 1.

  3. Flash other Zephyr application over USB using MCUmgr-compatible tool and reset target to boot into the image.

    Build the blinky example with MCUboot support:

    # From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b ctcc/nrf52840 samples/basic/blinky -- -DCONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=y -DCONFIG_MCUBOOT_SIGNATURE_KEY_FILE=\"path/to/mcuboot/boot/root-rsa-2048.pem\"

Note

In all examples it is assumed to use default root-rsa-2048.pem file from mcuboot/boot directory. Providing certificate in build args produces signed binary automatically. Do not use this certificate in your production firmware!

Debugging

These boards do not have an on-board J-Link debug IC, however instructions from the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page also apply to them, with the additional step of connecting an external debugger.

To test flashed software, plug in ctcc card to mPCIe/M.2 slot or use mPCIe/M.2 adapter to USB and plug such adapter to USB port.

  • For ctcc/nrf52840 check on Linux system by entering lsusb command if the following device appears: NordicSemiconductor MCUBOOT or NordicSemiconductor USB-DEV (when booted into blinky example).

  • For ctcc/nrf9161 it’s not possible to see a change in lsusb due to the on-board USB-UART converter. Intead, connect to the UART console using a terminal emulation program of your choice.

References