.. zephyr:board:: particle_boron

Overview

The Particle Boron is a cellular-enabled development board with a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 for mesh support and an LTE or 2G/3G modem. The board was developed by Particle Industries and has a SWD connector on it for programming.

It is equipped with a onboard LIPO circuit and conforms to the Adafruit Feather formfactor.

The Particle Boron board provides support for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 ARM® Cortex®-M4F SoC with an integrated 2.4 GHz transceiver supporting Bluetooth® Low Energy and IEEE® 802.15.4.

For more information about the Particle Boron board:

Boron Datasheet_
Boron Hardware Files_

Hardware

On the front of the board are RGB-LED, LED and LIPO circuitry. The RGB-LED is controlled by the nRF52840 via GPIO pins.

Power supply

The board is optimized for low power applications and supports two power source configurations: battery and micro USB connector.

It contains circuitry for LIPO usage and can be charged via the USB port.

Supported Features

.. zephyr:board-supported-hw::

Connections and IOs

Please see the Boron Datasheet_ for header pin assignments, which are common to all Feather-compatible Particle boards. Some peripherals are available to applications through DTS overlay include directives:

mesh_feather_spi_spi3.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI pins
mesh_feather_spi1_spi3.dtsi exposes SPI3 on labeled Feather SPI1 pins
mesh_feather_uart1_rtscts.dtsi adds hardware flow control to labeled Feather UART pins

LED

LED0 (blue)
LED1 (red)
LED2 (green)
LED3 (blue)

Push buttons

SW0 via MODE
SW1 via RESET

I2C

TWI0 enabled on labeled header (SDA/SCL)
TWI1 enabled for internal power management ICs

SPI

SPI0 disabled due to TWI0 conflict
SPI1 disabled due to TWI1 conflict
SPI2 internal to 32 Mb CFI flash chip
SPI3 selectable with overlay (SPI or SPI1)

UART

UARTE0 enabled RX/TX on labeled header (UART1); add RTS/CTS with overlay
UARTE1 internal to u-blox cellular modem

Programming and Debugging

.. zephyr:board-supported-runners::

Applications for the particle_boron board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way (see :ref:build_an_application and :ref:application_run for more details).

Flashing

Build and flash an application in the usual way, for example:

.. zephyr-app-commands:: :zephyr-app: samples/basic/blinky :board: particle_boron :goals: build flash

Debugging

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the :zephyr:code-sample:hello_world application.

.. zephyr-app-commands:: :zephyr-app: samples/hello_world :board: particle_boron :maybe-skip-config: :goals: debug

Testing the LEDs and buttons

There are 2 samples that allow you to test that the buttons (switches) and LEDs on the board are working properly with Zephyr:

:zephyr:code-sample:blinky
:zephyr:code-sample:button

You can build and flash the examples to make sure Zephyr is running correctly on your board.

.. _Boron Datasheet: https://docs.particle.io/datasheets/cellular/boron-datasheet/

.. _Boron Hardware Files: https://github.com/particle-iot/boron