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.
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 supports the hardware features listed below.
- on-chip / on-board
- Feature integrated in the SoC / present on the board.
- 2 / 2
-
Number of instances that are enabled / disabled.
Click on the label to see the first instance of this feature in the board/SoC DTS files. -
vnd,foo -
Compatible string for the Devicetree binding matching the feature.
Click on the link to view the binding documentation.
particle_boron/nrf52840 target
Type |
Location |
Description |
Compatible |
|---|---|---|---|
CPU |
on-chip |
ARM Cortex-M4F CPU1 |
|
ADC |
on-chip |
Nordic Semiconductor nRF family SAADC node1 |
|
ARM architecture |
on-chip |
Nordic UICR (User Information Configuration Registers)1 |
|
on-chip |
Nordic EGU (Event Generator Unit)6 |
||
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family ACL (Access Control List)1 |
||
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family MWU (Memory Watch Unit)1 |
||
Audio |
on-chip |
Nordic PDM (Pulse Density Modulation interface)1 |
|
Clock control |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF clock control node1 |
|
Comparator |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF COMP (analog COMParator)1 |
|
Counter |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF timer node5 |
|
Cryptographic accelerator |
on-chip |
Nordic ECB (AES electronic codebook mode encryption)1 |
|
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family CCM (AES CCM mode encryption)1 |
||
on-chip |
ARM TrustZone CryptoCell 3101 |
||
Debug |
on-chip |
ARMv7 instrumentation trace macrocell1 |
|
Flash controller |
on-chip |
Nordic NVMC (Non-Volatile Memory Controller)1 |
|
on-chip |
Properties defining the interface for the Nordic QSPI peripheral1 |
||
GPIO & Headers |
on-chip |
NRF5 GPIOTE1 |
|
on-chip |
NRF5 GPIO2 |
||
on-board |
GPIO pins exposed on Particle Gen3 (Feather) headers1 |
||
on-board |
GPIO pins exposed on Adafruit Feather headers1 |
||
I2C |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family TWI (TWI master)2 |
|
I2S |
on-chip |
Nordic I2S (Inter-IC sound interface)1 |
|
IEEE 802.15.4 |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF IEEE 802.15.4 node1 |
|
Input |
on-board |
Group of GPIO-bound input keys1 |
|
Interrupt controller |
on-chip |
ARMv7-M NVIC (Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller)1 |
|
LED |
on-board |
Group of GPIO-controlled LEDs1 |
|
Miscellaneous |
on-chip |
Nordic FICR (Factory Information Configuration Registers)1 |
|
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family PPI (Programmable Peripheral Interconnect)1 |
||
on-board |
Output selectors on the SKY13351 GaAs SPDT FET I/C switch1 |
||
Modem |
on-board |
u-blox SARA-R4 modem1 |
|
MTD |
on-chip |
Flash node1 |
|
on-chip |
Fixed partitions of a flash (or other non-volatile storage) memory1 |
||
on-board |
Properties supporting Zephyr spi-nor flash driver (over the Zephyr SPI API) control of serial flash memories using the standard M25P80-based command set1 |
||
Networking |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family RADIO peripheral1 |
|
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family NFCT (Near Field Communication Tag)1 |
||
Pin control |
on-chip |
The nRF pin controller is a singleton node responsible for controlling pin function selection and pin properties1 |
|
Power management |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF power control node1 |
|
PWM |
on-chip |
nRF PWM4 |
|
on-chip |
nRFx S/W PWM1 |
||
Regulator |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF5X regulator (fixed stage of the core supply)1 |
|
on-chip |
Nordic nRF52X regulator (high voltage stage of the main supply)1 |
||
on-board |
Fixed voltage regulators1 |
||
Retained memory |
on-chip |
Nordic GPREGRET (General Purpose Register Retention) device2 |
|
RNG |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family RNG (Random Number Generator)1 |
|
RTC |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF RTC (Real-Time Counter)3 |
|
Sensors |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family TEMP node1 |
|
on-chip |
Nordic nRF quadrature decoder (QDEC) node1 |
||
Serial controller |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family UARTE (UART with EasyDMA)2 |
|
SPI |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family SPIM (SPI master with EasyDMA)3 |
|
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family SPI (SPI master)1 |
||
SRAM |
on-chip |
Generic on-chip SRAM description1 |
|
Timer |
on-chip |
ARMv7-M System Tick1 |
|
USB |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF52 USB device controller1 |
|
Watchdog |
on-chip |
Nordic nRF family WDT (Watchdog Timer)1 |
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.dtsiexposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI pinsmesh_feather_spi1_spi3.dtsiexposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI1 pinsmesh_feather_uart1_rtscts.dtsiadds hardware flow control to labeled Feather UART pins
LED
LED0 (blue)
LED1 (red)
LED2 (green)
LED3 (blue)
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 Building an Application
and Run an Application for more details).
Flashing
Build and flash an application in the usual way, for example:
# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b particle_boron samples/basic/blinky
west flash
Debugging
You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.
# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b particle_boron samples/hello_world
west debug