nRF52 Radio Exercise

In this exercise you'll get familiar with:

  • the structure of embedded Rust programs,
  • the existing embedded Rust tooling, and
  • embedded application development using a Board Support Package (BSP).

To put these concepts in practice you'll write applications that use the radio functionality of the nRF52840 microcontroller.

You should have acquired two development boards for your training. We'll use both in the this radio exercise.

The nRF52840 Development Kit

This is the larger development board.

The board has two USB ports: J2 and J3 and an on-board J-Link programmer / debugger -- there are instructions to identify the ports in a previous section. USB port J2 is the J-Link's USB port. USB port J3 is the nRF52840's USB port. Connect the Development Kit to your computer using the J2 port.

The nRF52840 Dongle

This is the smaller development board.

The board has the form factor of a USB stick and can be directly connected to one of the USB ports of your PC / laptop. Do not connect it just yet.

The nRF52840

Both development boards have an nRF52840 microcontroller. Here are some details that are relevant to these exercises:

  • single core ARM Cortex-M4 processor clocked at 64 MHz
  • 1 MB of Flash (at address 0x0000_0000)
  • 256 KB of RAM (at address 0x2000_0000)
  • IEEE 802.15.4 and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) compatible radio
  • USB controller (device function)