Contextual Electronics Advanced BLE Cell

Overview

The Contextual Electronics ABC (PCA10056) hardware provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 ARM Cortex-M4F CPU and the following devices:

CLOCK
FLASH
GPIO
I2C
MPU
NVIC
PWM
Segger RTT (RTT Console)
SPI
UART
Quectel BG95 Modem

Contextual Electronics Advanced BLE Cell (Credit: Chris Gamell)

More information about the board can be found at the ABC Board website [1]. The Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter [2] contains the processor’s information and the datasheet.

Hardware

ABC board has two external oscillators. The frequency of the slow clock is 32.768 kHz. The frequency of the main clock is 32 MHz.

nRF52840 ARM Cortex-M4F processor at 64 MHz
1 MB flash memory and 256 KB of SRAM
SWD connector

Supported Features

The contextualelectronics_abc board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface	Controller	Driver/Component
CLOCK	on-chip	clock_control
FLASH	on-chip	flash
GPIO	on-chip	gpio
I2C(M)	on-chip	i2c
MPU	on-chip	arch/arm
NVIC	on-chip	arch/arm
PWM	on-chip	pwm
RTC	on-chip	system clock
RTT	Segger	console
SPI(M)	on-chip	spi
UART	on-chip	serial
Modem	on-board	quectel_bg9x

Other hardware features have not been enabled yet for this board. See ABC Board website [1] for more details on this board, and Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter [2] for a complete list of SoC features.

Programming and Debugging

Applications for the contextualelectronics_abc board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Flashing

Flashing Zephyr onto the contextualelectronics_abc board requires an external programmer. The programmer is attached to the SWD header.

Build the Zephyr kernel and the Hello World sample application.

west build -b contextualelectronics_abc samples/hello_world

Flash the image.

west build -b contextualelectronics_abc samples/hello_world
west flash

To see the output, run your favorite terminal program.

$ minicom -D <tty_device> -b 115200

Replace <tty_device> with the port where the ABC board can be found. For example, under Linux, /dev/ttyACM0.

Debugging

Refer to the Nordic nRF5x Segger J-Link page to learn about debugging Nordic boards with a Segger IC.

Selecting the pins

Pins can be configured in the board pinctrl file. To see the available mappings, open the nRF52840 Product Specification [3], chapter 7 ‘Hardware and Layout’. In the table 7.1.1 ‘aQFN73 ball assignments’ select the pins marked ‘General purpose I/O’. Note that pins marked as ‘low frequency I/O only’ can only be used in under-10KHz applications. They are not suitable for 115200 speed of UART.