nRF7002 Expansion Board Boosts Nordic Thingy:53's Connectivity with Wi-Fi 6

Nordic Semiconductor introduced a new expansion board for their Thingy:53 IoT rapid prototyping platform: the nRF7002 EB adds Wi-Fi 6, providing a single device that can communicate via Matter, Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, and dual-band Wi-Fi.

The nRF7002 Expansion Board contains the nRF7002 Wi-Fi 6 companion IC, dual-band (2.4 and 5 GHz) antenna, and an SWF connector for RF measurements. The board's design is intriguing because it works standalone with its castellated edges or as an expansion module for the Nordic Thingy:53.

Thingy:53 is a compact rapid prototyping IoT device based on Nordic's flagship nRF53 system-on-chip (SoC). The nRF5340 has two Arm Cortex-M33 processors split between application and networking tasks and a 2.4 GHz Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE) radio.

Inside the Thingy:53, the SoC connects to integrated sensors for temperature, humidity, color, light, accelerometers, and a magnetometer. This combination of sensors and connectivity makes Thingy:53 an ideal platform for edge machine-learning applications. For example, it can send data and receive models from Edge Impulse.

Edge Impulse enables developers to efficiently create and deploy machine learning models on edge devices. Its platform lets you quickly build datasets, train models, and optimize libraries to run on microcontrollers like the Nordic SoC nRF53 family.

Uniting Thingy:53 with Edge Impulse made collecting data, creating a model, and testing it simple. However, the setup required a mobile device running the nRF Edge Impulse app connected to Thingy:53 via Bluetooth.

nRF7002 Expansion Board

With the new nRF7002 Expansion Board, Thingy:53 can send data directly to Edge Impulse Studio! The nRF7002 EB connects to the Thingy:53's expansion port, and a firmware upgrade enables the host nRF53 SoC to communicate with the nRF7002 via SPI and a three-wire coexistence (COEX) interface. COEX enables multiple radios to work seamlessly together.

Matter is an example protocol that benefits from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on a single device. An IoT device can use nRF53's BLE to commission the device and then use nRF70's Wi-Fi 6 for high data throughput.

Nordic's nRF70 companion ICs support Wi-Fi 6 features like Target Wake Time (TWT), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), BSS Coloring, and SSID-based locationing.

The nRF7002 EB is not limited to just the Thingy:53! The expansion connector portion of the board breaks away, leaving 18 castellated pads for soldering to another PCB. The castellated pads break out of all of the digital signal pins of the nRF70 IC for communication with almost any host processor.

The nRF7002 EB is available today from Nordic's distribution partners. For example, it is currently in stock at Newark for $16.24 before shipping. Check out the nRF7002 Expansion Board product page for more information.