Seeed Studio Packs BLE 6.0, Thread, Matter, Zigbee, and More Into the New XIAO nRF54L15
Compact development board, built around the Nordic Semi nRF54L15 chip, is also available in a "Sense" variant with IMU and microphone.
Seeed Studio has announced two new entries in its growing XIAO family of compact development boards, both built around Nordic Semiconductor's nRF54L15 system-on-chip: the XIAO nRF54L15 and nRF54L15 Sense.
"[The] XIAO nRF54L15 ([and] Sense [variant]) is a powerful yet compact development board built around Nordic's nRF54L15 SoC," the company explains of the two new boards, "featuring a 128MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core with 1.5MB NVM [Non-Volatile Memory]. This thumb-sized board excels in modern IoT [Internet of Things] applications with comprehensive wireless connectivity including BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy] 6.0, Matter, Thread, Zigbee, and Amazon Sidewalk protocols. With ultra-low power consumption, it's ideal for battery-powered IoT devices."
Seeed's XIAO range are notable for their compact size, a little larger than a thumbnail, yet being built around fully-featured microcontrollers — and the new models are no exception. The Nordic nRF54L15 includes a single Arm Cortex-M33 core running at up to 128MHz, a big upgrade over the earlier XIAO nRF52840's Cortex-M4F core running at up to 64MHz, with a RISC-V coprocessor along for the ride. There's 256kB of static RAM (SRAM), plus 1.5MB of non-volatile storage.
The board follows the usual XIAO footprint, with its general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins brought out to 0.1" headers along either side. In total, there are 16 GPIO pins, six of which can act as analogue inputs, plus two I2C, two SPI, and one UART buses. The board also includes physical reset and boot buttons, a battery charging circuit with indicator LED, and a user-addressable single-color LED for status notifications.
Given Seeed's focus on IoT projects, it's no surprise to see the new XIAO packing in plenty of connectivity: the on-board radio includes support for Bluetooth 6.0 Low Energy (BLE) and 802.15.4 protocols including Thread, the cross-vendor Matter, and Zigbee. There's also a proprietary 2.4GHz protocol, boosted to offer up to 4Mb/s throughput, and support for Amazon's Sidewalk, Apple's Find My, and Google's Find My Device ecosystems via the Nordic nRF Connect software development kit (SDK). An on-board ceramic antenna is included in the design, with the option to use an external antenna via an IPEX4 connector.
If the XIAO nRF54L15 doesn't quite tick the feature boxes required of your new project, meanwhile, there's the XIAO nRF54L15 Sense — the same development board, but now with an on-board digital microphone and a six-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU). All other specifications are the same between the two models.
The XIAO nRF54L15 and XIAO nRF54L15 Sense are now available on the Seeed Studio store, priced at $9.90 and $15.99 respectively. More information is available on the Seeed wiki.