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Particle 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.

Particle Boron

Fig. 143 Particle Boron (Credit: Particle Industries)

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 configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

NVIC

on-chip

nested vectored interrupt controller

RTC

on-chip

system clock

UART

on-chip

serial port

I2C

on-chip

i2c

SPI

on-chip

spi

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

FLASH

on-chip

flash

RADIO

on-chip

Bluetooth

Other hardware features have not been enabled yet for this board.

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.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI pins

  • mesh_feather_spi1_spi3.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI1 pins

  • mesh_feather_uart1_rtscts.dtsi adds hardware flow control to labeled Feather UART pins

LED

  • LED0 (blue)

  • LED1 (red)

  • LED2 (green)

  • LED3 (blue)

Push buttons

  • SW0 via MODE

  • SW1 via RESET

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

Testing the LEDs and buttons

There are 2 samples that allow you to test that the buttons (switches) and LEDs on the board are working properly with Zephyr:

You can build and flash the examples to make sure Zephyr is running correctly on your board.