The Adafruit Feather nRF52 Pro is our latest Bluetooth Low Energy board for advanced projects and users who want to use a fully open source Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 stack. It has a native-bluetooth chip, the nRF52832, as well as built in USB Serial and battery charging!
We have other boards in the Feather family, check'em out here.
This is a special Feather - unlike the rest of the Feather family, this board is not for use with Arduino IDE. Instead, it is for use with Mynewt only! We have programmed it with the Mynewt bootloader and updated the hardware to add an SWD connector and an additional DFU button.
If you want to use the nRF52 with Arduino IDE please check out the Bluefruit nRF52 Feather which works out-of-the-box with our Arduino board support package.
This Feather is for advanced users only, you will be interacting with the Mynewt RTOS rather than Arduino and you cannot easily go back-and-forth without an SWD programmer.
At this point, the tools that Mynewt relies on are really aimed at running on a POSIX-type system (Linux, OS X, Mingw etc.) Windows users can also make use of the
Docker container
available on the Mynewt website.
Check out the Adafruit product guide for information about the Feather nRF52, getting set up and deploying your very own mynewt images
This chip has twice the flash, SRAM and performance of the earlier nRF51-based modules, and can do a lot of heavy lifting. That extra processing power and memory means you can now run an RTOS for fast development of complex projects. This board was designed to work with the
Apache Mynewt
operating system, which is released by the Apache Foundation under the permissive and commercial-friendly Apache license. Apache Mynewt includes a number of professionally written networking stacks (BLE 5.0,
OIC/OCF
, etc.), development tools, and professional project management features like a secure bootloader that allows you to cryptographically sign firmware images and verify them during device updates.
The Adafruit Feather nRF52 Pro ships pre-programmed with the Mynewt serial bootloader that allows you to flash firmware to the device directly from the command-line using the on-board USB Serial converter and the 'newtmgr' tool, so you can get started right away with no additional hardware required. For more advanced debugging, however, you can use a Segger J-Link and the on-board SWD debug connector, which gives you access to a more powerful set of development tools and options.
We also have a custom Mynewt Manager application that we've written for iOS that allows you to perform over the air firmware updates, and get live updates of the tasks running in the task manager, or to see any statistics generated by the internal reporting systems that are part of the OS.
Features:
- ARM Cortex M4F (with HW floating point acceleration) running at 64MHz
- 512KB flash and 64KB SRAM
- Built in USB Serial converter for fast and efficient programming and debugging
- Bluetooth Low Energy compatible 2.4GHz radio (Details available in the
nRF52832
product specification)
- FCC / IC / TELEC certified module
- Up to +4dBm output power
- 1.7v to 3.3v operation with internal linear and DC/DC voltage regulators
- 19 GPIO, 8 x 12-bit ADC pins, up to 12 PWM outputs (3 PWM modules with 4 outputs each)
- Pin #17 red LED for general purpose blinking
- Power/enable pin
- Measures 2.0" x 0.9" x 0.28" (51mm x 23mm x 8mm) without headers soldered in
- Light as a (large?) feather - 5.7 grams
- 4 mounting holes
- Reset button