Nordic Launches Wide-Temperature Direction-Finding nRF52833 Bluetooth SoC, Development Board

Offers Bluetooth 5, Thread, Zigbee connectivity, plus Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding — and all at operating temps up to 105°C (221°F).

Nordic Semiconductor has announced the launch of the nRF52833 Bluetooth 5.1 system-on-chip, complete with supporting development board, offering support for Bluetooth mesh networking, Thread and Zigbee connectivity, and Bluetooth 5.1 Direction Finding — as well as an extended operating temperature range of -40°C to 105°C.

Designed for both commercial and industrial applications, the Nordic nRF52833 is designed to offer multi-protocol support: Based on an Arm Cortex-M4 running at 64MHz with floating-point unit (FPU) and 128kB RAM, the SoC includes 512kB of flash memory and support for Bluetooth mesh, Thread, and Zigbee networking — plus Bluetooth Direction Finding, added to the Bluetooth spec as part of Bluetooth 5.1 to allow devices to measure angle of arrival and angle of departure (AoA and AoD) to position devices to an accuracy of under one metre (around 3.3 feet.)

The SoC also includes a selection of analogue and digital interfaces, including near-field communication (NFC) support, an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), 32MHz SPI, full-speed USB 2.0 connectivity, PWM, I2S, and PDM, with a 1.7V to 5.5V operating voltage. More impressive is the part's operating temperature, which Nordic puts at -40°C to 105°C (-40°F to 221°F).

To help developers get started, Nordic has announced the nRF52833 Development Kit (nRF52833 DK), which breaks out the features of the nRF52833 onto a sizeable development board designed to be compatible with the Arduino Uno Rev. 3 standard — meaning it can use shield add-ons originally designed for the Nano, up to and including Nordic's own Power Profiler Kit. The board features USB, Li-Po, or CR2023 coin-cell power options, an on-board J-link debugger, and provides four user-programmable LEDs and four buttons on top of all the IO and interfaces of the chip itself.

The development board is available now from Nordic resellers, priced at $49 per unit with more information available from the official product page. Technical details on the SoC, including a reference layout, can be found on the Nordic website.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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