Design Document of Development board based on NRF52840 MCU

This document contains the design of development board based on NRF52840

Microcontroller.
The hardware block diagram is shown below:

Main hardware components of this design are listed below:

Component (IC) Type Feature Designator
nRF52840 MicroController Main Microcontroller U6
of the System
nRF9160 SOC (System on This SOC is used for U1
Chip) GPS and GSM
 Tracking
ESP12 Wifi Microchip Used for Wifi U13
Integration
MPU-9250 Motion Tracking Used to provide Gyro IC1
SiP (System in + Accelerometer +
Package) Compass feature

BME680 Precision Sensor Used to measure U9

Pressure, Humidity,
Temperature and Gas
sensor
BH1749NUC Digital Color Used to obtain the U10
Sensor accurate illuminance
and color
temperature of
ambient light
AST7525MATRQ Transducer Used to produce an Bz1
Buzzer audio beep sound
RCWL-0516 Microwave Radar Motion detection IC5
Sensor
NTCS0805E3103FLT NTC Thermistor For measuring RT1
Temperature
ILI9341 TFT LCD For display data from 1
NRF52
SCD40 CO2 Sensor For sensing CO2 U14
AJU55-BS2111-L MicoUSB B For USB connection J6
Connector from nRF52 to
external device
5141-05RZDNWR01 NFC Antenna For NFC Antenna J5
Connector
CM1402-03CP Sim Card For insertion of SIM D3
SF72S006VBAR2500 Connector card to work for GSM J4
module
ADP536x Integrated Chip Power Supply U11
(IC) Management
Solution

Detailed Description:
This nRF52 based Development board is versatile kit for Bluetooth low energy
mesh, NFC, Wifi, Gsm, Gps, Motion Tracking and various sensors.
It has a TFT Lcd for display and Leds for display control. Also GPIOs are
available on headers for further integration of sensors/modules.
It has 3 main controllers:
1 – nRF52840
nRF52840 is a Bluetooth 5 based SoC. It has support for protocols for
Bluetooth 5 , Bluetooth Mesh, Zigbee, Thread, ANT, 802.15.4 and 2.4 Ghz
proprietary Stacks.
Main features of this SOC are
 32 bit Cortex M4 ARM
 1MB Flash
 256 KB RAM
 Bluetooth 5, and Bluetooth Mesh
 Zigbee, Thread, ANT
 UART, SPI, I2S, PDM, QSPI
 USB 2.0
 NFC-A
This the main processor of this development board and has a lot of processing
power, memory and speed for any application. Also, this system is extremely
low power because of an on chip adaptive power management system.
All the sensors and peripherals listed above can be controlled by this main
controller either directly or indirectly.
2 – nRF9160
This nRF9160 SiP (System In Package) is used to add low power LTE system and
GPS receiver functionality in this development board. It communicates with
main processor Nrf52 via I2C.
This SiP is low power and compact having following features:
 64 Mhz
 Fully integrated SiP for cellular IoT Multimode LTE-M/NB-IoT modem
with GPS
 700-2200 Mhz LTE band
  1 MB Flash + 256 KB Ram
 64 Mhz Arm Cortex-M33
 SIM and eSIM support
3 – Esp-12
ESP 12 WiFi module is added in this development board for WiFi integration.
This module communicates with main processor nRF52 via UART.
This module is ultra-low power and small size along with following features
 32-bit MCU
 80 Mhz/ 160 Mhz
 Wifi On Board Antenna
 Supports RTOS
 Complete TCP/IP protocol stack
These three modules are the main controllers of the board that provide all the
features to the development board as mentioned above.
Below are the details of sensors that are interfaced in the dev board.
1 - MPU-9250
MPU-9250 is a multi-chip module (MCM) that contains two dies united inside a
single QFN package. One die has 3-Axis magnetometer from Asahi Kasei
Microdevices Corporation integrated and the other die contains 3 Axis
accelerometer and 3 Axis gyroscope.
It communicates with master MCU with I2C bus at 0x68 and 0x0C address.
MPU-9250 has following features:
a) Gyroscope Features
 Digital Output X-, Y-, Z- Axis angular rate sensors with user
programmable full scale +250, +500, +1000 and +2000o /sec and 16-
bit ADCs.
 Programmable low pass filter
 Operating current for Gyroscope: 3.2mA
b) Accelerometer Features
 Tri-axis accelerometer with programable full scale range of +2g, +4g,
+8g, +16g and 16-bit ADCs.
 Operating current for accelerometer: 450uA
  Programmable interrupts
 Low power mode: 8.4uA @ 0.98Hz, 19.8uA @ 31.25Hz
c) Magnetometer Features
 Triple axis silicon monolithic Hall Effect magnetic Sensor along with
magnetic concentrator
 14-bit (0.6uT/LSB) data resolution
 Full Scale measurement range is +4800uT
 280uA current at 8Hz repetition rate
2 - BME680
BME680 is a sensor capable of measuring ambient temperature, relative
humidity, barometric pressure and Volatile organic compounds in air.
It communicates with master MCU with I2C bus at 0x76 address.
It has following features:
 +3% accuracy of humidity measurement
 +1hPa absolute accuracy of barometric pressure measurement
 +1.0 C temperature accuracy
 +1-meter accuracy of altimeter
 Can be used for quick GPS-fix and better navigation
3 - BH1749NUC
BH1749NUC is a digital RGB color sensor IC. This IC converts Infrared, Red,
Blue, Green light and converts them into digital values. It is widely used as
adjusting LCD backlight of mobile, tablet PC and TV.
It communicates with master MCU with I2C bus at 0x38 address.
It has following features:
 Ircut filter
 Reject 50/60 Hz light noise
 0.0125 lx/count resolution
 2 type of I2C slave addresses can be selected

4 - AST7525MATRQ
AST7525MATRQ is an audio signaling device also known as buzzer. It is
connected with nrf9160 via GPIO.
It has a sound pressure level 85dB/min at 10cm at rated voltage (3.6V)
Current Consumption Max: 100mA
Oscillation Frequency: 2700 Hz
5 - RCWL-0516
RCWL-0516 is a microwave radar sensor module for motion detection.
It is connected with nrf52 controller via GPIO. The GPIO will toggle high in case
of motion detection and 0V when no motion is detected.
6 - NTCS0805E3103FLT
NTCS0805E3103FLT is a low footprint NTC thermistor.
It has an accuracy of 1%.
Temperature measuring range is -40oC to +150oC.
It is connected with nRF52 controller via GPIO and temperature will be
calculated by controller using ADC converter.
7 - ILI9341
ILI9341 is a SPI based TFT LCD display size of 240x320. It has 8/9/16/18-bit
data bus and 3 / 4 line SPI for MCU interface. This TFT lcd is interfaced with
nRF52 controller via SPI line.
ILI9341 is 262,144 color single chip SoC for display data from nRF52 controller.
In this development board this TFT lcd can be used to display any kind of
output with RGB colors and resolution of 240x320 dots. It can easily be used
for a lot of consumer applications where hardware needs to show a lot of data
to the consumer in a sophisticated and aesthetic way.
8 - SCD40
SCD40 is ultra-small Carbon Dioxide Sensor based on photoacoustic sensing
principle. It measures CO2, humidity and temperature and uses I2C interface to
communicate with the nrf52 controller.
SCD40 has following features:
  0 ppm – 40,000 ppm Measurement range
 Accuracy +(30 ppm + 3% MV)
 Smallest form factor
All of these sensors, LTE/GPS and WiFi modules communicates with main
nRF52 processor to provide all access and control of features as mentioned
above. Any kind of IoT or embedded application can be implemented on this
development board having all the above features.