SparkFun's Thing Plus NINA-B306 Packs in the Sensors, Boasts STMicro's Machine Learning Core IMU Too
Boasting a three-reading environmental sensor and an STMicro IMU with machine learning smarts, this Bluetooth dev board packs a punch.
SparkFun has launched a new Thing Plus, this time powered by the u-blox NINA-B306 and featuring three integrated environmental sensors and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to get your project started.
"The SparkFun Thing Plus NINA-B306 is a Bluetooth-compliant development board that is, in our testing, an environmental sensing powerhouse," SparkFun's Chris McCarty claims of the company's latest board design, which uses the company's Feather-style Thing Plus form factor and includes both Qwiic and lithium-polymer battery connections along with breadboard-friendly general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins to either side.
The heart of the board is a u-blox NINA-B306, which features a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 system-on-chip with a single Arm Cortex-M4F core running at up to 64MHz, 256kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 1MB of flash memory. There's support for Bluetooth 5.3, Bluetooth Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4, Thread, Zigbee, and proprietary 2.4GHz communication — though not, it must be noted, Wi-Fi.
To this, SparkFun has added a Bosch Sensortec BME280 environmental sensor with temperature, humidity, and pressure sensing, connected via I2C, plus an STMicro ISM330DHCX iNEMO six degrees of freedom (6DoF) inertial measurement unit — one of the new generation of sensors from STMicro to include a built-in machine learning core (MLC) and finite state machine (FSM) for tilt-detection, free-fall sensing, orientation, click, and step counting, all happening on-sensor without having to bog down the host CPU.
Elsewhere on the board is a connector for a single-cell lithium-polymer battery, using a Microchip MC73831 charger for a 500mA charge rate, a four-pin Qwiic connector for solder-free expansion, a microSD slot for storage, and 21 general-purpose input/output pins including I2C, UART, and I2C interfaces plus six analog inputs and eight digital input/outputs. Power and data, meanwhile, can be provided via a USB Type-C connector at the base of the board.
The Thing Plus NINA-B306 is available on the SparkFun store now for $89.95 before volume discounts, with more information available in the company's hookup guide.