nRF51 Dongle

Support for the Nordic nRF51 Dongle.

Overview:

The nRF51822 is a multi-protocol SoC ideally suited for Bluetooth® low energy and 2.4GHz ultra low-power wireless applications from Nordic Semiconductor. The nRF51822 is built around a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™ M0 CPU with 256kB flash + 16kB RAM. The embedded 2.4GHz transceiver supports Bluetooth low energy as well as 2.4GHz operation.

Nordic’s development kit contains two different boards:

  • pca10000: a USB-dongle containing the nRF51822 and a RGB-Led
  • pca10005: two a basic nRF51822 boards making the MCU pins available

While the pca10000 contains an on-board J-Link debugger, the pca10005 boards have to be flashed/debugged using the (included) external J-Link device.

Hardware:

MCU NRF51822QFAA
Family ARM Cortex-M0
Vendor Nordic Semiconductor
RAM 16Kb
Flash 256Kb
Frequency 16MHz
FPU no
Timers 3 (2x 16-bit, 1x 32-bit [TIMER0])
ADCs 1x 10-bit (8 channels)
UARTs 1
SPIs 2
I2Cs 2
Radio 2.4GHz BLE compatiple, +4dBm to -20 dBm output, -93 dBm RX sensitivity
Vcc 1.8V - 3.6V
Datasheet Datasheet (pdf file)
Reference Manual Reference Manual

Flashing the Device:

The nRF51822 PC10000 board is shipped with an on-board JLink debugger. However the PC10004/5 board uses an external flash tool as seen in the Image above. Under Linux, the easiest way flashing the nRF51822 is using the JLink tool(version >4.85) from Segger.

To interact with the board just start the tool using the following command: # JLinkExe -device nrf51822

For RIOT itself there is a Flash-Script available. When using any of the Examples type in the following command: # Make -B clean flash