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zephyr: Add Seeed Studio's XIAO BLE NRF52840 SENSE board. #17679

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zephyr: Add Seeed Studio's XIAO BLE NRF52840 SENSE board. #17679

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bikeNomad
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Summary

This PR adds Zephyr support for Seeed Studio's XIAO BLE NRF52840 SENSE board.

It also provides a good example of a richer Zephyr port than the default, adding:

  • Frozen modules (including asyncio, upysh, aioble, neopixel, and aiorepl).
  • Enough MicroPython features to support using aioble (at least for the temp_sensor.py example)
  • JSON, random, re, struct, etc.
  • Support for my Zephyr ADC code (see PR zephyr: Add ADC support #17615)
  • Mounted LFS2 filesystem using the 2MiB flash mounted as /flash

You can build it in the usual way:

$ cd ports/zephyr
$ west build -b xiao_ble/nrf52840/sense .

This will produce a .uf2 file in build/zephyr/zephyr.uf2 that can be copied into the XIAO-SENSE USB drive that appears when you double-click the RESET button.

Testing

I have tested this on several of these boards, with and without my ADC (#17615) and zensor.Sensor.attr_set() (#17653) PRs.

I have run the aioble temp_sensor.py example but haven't done much more with the BLE.

Trade-offs and Alternatives

The build size is as follows:

Memory region         Used Size  Region Size  %age Used
           FLASH:      428864 B       788 KB     53.15%
             RAM:      165908 B       256 KB     63.29%
        IDT_LIST:          0 GB        32 KB      0.00%

@dpgeorge dpgeorge mentioned this pull request Jul 15, 2025
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Thanks for the contribution, this is a nice addition.

I've opened #17680 which should help simplify this PR.

@dpgeorge dpgeorge added this to the release-1.26.0 milestone Jul 15, 2025
@bikeNomad bikeNomad force-pushed the ned/zephyr-add-xiao-ble-nrf52840-sense branch from 3857a69 to 469d4f0 Compare July 15, 2025 18:59
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ned-pcs commented Jul 15, 2025

@dpgeorge OK, simplified using your PR #17680. Will re-base when you merge it into mainline.

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ned-pcs commented Jul 15, 2025

The additional features defined in mpconfigport-xiao.h add 12224 bytes of flash and 12 bytes of RAM size.

dpgeorge
dpgeorge reviewed Jul 16, 2025
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Blafy commented Jul 16, 2025

Great !
Do you have a plan to implement a disable flag for the p25q16h ?
This little flash is IMO a bad addition on this board, as it requires to be put into suspend mode to keep the nice low power of the NRF chip ...

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bikeNomad commented Jul 16, 2025 •
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@Blafy asks:

Great ! Do you have a plan to implement a disable flag for the p25q16h ? This little flash is IMO a bad addition on this board, as it requires to be put into suspend mode to keep the nice low power of the NRF chip ...

Good question. Not using this flash means that instead of 2MiB filesystem we'd have only 32KiB, at least without partition modification.

The stock "Storage" partition (given the original overlay; see nrf52840_partition_uf2_sdv7.dtsi ) on the NRF chip is only 32kB in size (156kB is given to the SoftDevice that we don't use, and 48kB is saved for the UF2 bootloader). The way these boards are set up at the factory includes the UF2 bootloader and SoftDevice. Using MCUBoot and two app partitions (see nrf52840_partition.dtsi) still only leaves 32kB of storage space.

Although the newest Adafruit UF2 bootloader allows for having no SoftDevice (thus maybe letting us use the 156kiB space for /flash instead), I haven't tried this.

As for putting it into suspend mode, I would hope that the nordic,qspi-nor driver would do this when possible. I've seen current consumption in the 1-2mA range even without the new lightsleep code.

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This can now be rebased, because the mpconfigport.h changes were merged.

Also, this PR is currently blocked behind #17616 (ADC support), which may take some time to resolve. If you want to get this PR in now (before ADC support) then please remove all the ADC and io-channel stuff from this PR. Otherwise this PR can wait, no hurry.

bikeNomad added 5 commits July 31, 2025 08:29
@bikeNomad
zephyr: Add Seeed Studio's XIAO BLE NRF52840 SENSE board.
06ef71e 
Signed-off-by: Ned Konz <ned@metamagix.tech>
@bikeNomad
zephyr: Add comments and copyright notices to XIAO NRF52840 SENSE boa…
62f16e8 
…rd files.

Signed-off-by: Ned Konz <ned@metamagix.tech>
@bikeNomad
zephyr: Simplify XIAO BLE NRF52840 SENSE mpconfigport using PR microp…
1b04774 
…ython#17680.

@dpgeorge's PR micropython#17680 defines the standard Zephyr config based on MICROPY_CONFIG_ROM_LEVEL_BASIC.
This allows for simplifying the XIAO BLE board's mpconfigport-xiao.h.

Signed-off-by: Ned Konz <ned@metamagix.tech>
@bikeNomad
zephyr: Turn off CONFIG_DISK_ACCESS for the XIAO BLE board.
a3f067d 
Signed-off-by: Ned Konz <ned@metamagix.tech>
@bikeNomad
zephyr: Move XIAO BLE NRF52840 SENSE files into board-specific subdir…
7b7a69b 
…ectory.

Signed-off-by: Ned Konz <ned@metamagix.tech>
@bikeNomad bikeNomad force-pushed the ned/zephyr-add-xiao-ble-nrf52840-sense branch from 1672be8 to 7b7a69b Compare July 31, 2025 15:30
@bikeNomad
zephyr: Remove ADC from XIAO BLE board for now.
4a22b38 
Signed-off-by: Ned Konz <ned@metamagix.tech>
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ned-pcs commented Jul 31, 2025

This can now be rebased, because the mpconfigport.h changes were merged.

Also, this PR is currently blocked behind #17616 (ADC support), which may take some time to resolve. If you want to get this PR in now (before ADC support) then please remove all the ADC and io-channel stuff from this PR. Otherwise this PR can wait, no hurry.

OK, rebased and removed ADC stuff from mpconfigport.h and the overlay.

dpgeorge
dpgeorge reviewed Aug 1, 2025
View reviewed changes
@bikeNomad
zephyr: Address PR comments in XIAO_BLE code.
6b76259 
Signed-off-by: Ned Konz <ned@metamagix.tech>
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