SparkFun Thing Plus 8211 nRF9160

Description

SparkFun has teamed up with CircuitDojo to bring you the SparkFun nRF9160 Thing Plus, featuring the powerful Nordic nRF9160 microcontroller in a Feather-compatible footprint. This little chip is capable of both CAT M1 LTE and NB-IoT cellular communication and is designed to work with Zephyr, the go-to RTOS for embedded development. To make the Thing Plus even easier to use, this board utilizes our handy Qwiic Connect System which means no soldering or shields are required to connect it to the rest of your system! Not only can you take advantage of Nordics advanced power states, but you can also put the device into a low power standby state. Laboratory measurements are putting that mode at about 2A of current. 2A! It also features a 3.3V Buck-Boost which helps get every mWh from your batteries as possible. No batteries? No problem! Power your nRF9160 Thing Plus externally with a USB-C cable. Keep it on at all times for high availability scenarios. Want to persist data? The nRF9160 Thing Plus has a 4MB external flash for storing data while offline. Using external flash with a filesystem like LitteFS and youll have a project to recon with! Get Started with the Sparkfun NRF9160 Thing Plus Hookup Guide Features Nordic nRF9160 Microcontroller with ARM Cortex M33 1MB Flash 256kB RAM ARM TrustZone ARM Cryptocell 310 Up to 4x SPI, I2C and UART with Easy DMA I2S w/ EasyDMA 4x PWM with EasyDMA 12bit SADC with EasyDMA 2x RTC PPI (Programmable peripheral interconnect) interface Radio Transceiver and baseband 3GPP LTE release 13 Category M1 and NB1 compliant 3GPP release 14 NB2 compliant GPS receiver (GPS L1 C/A supported) – Active antenna only. RF Transceiver for global coverage supporting bands: Cat-M1: B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B8, B12, B13, B14, B17, B18, B19, B20, B25, B26, B28, B66 Cat-NB1/NB2: B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B8, B12, B13, B17, B18, B20, B25, B26, B28, B66 Supports 4FF Nano SIM USB-C connection for USB-to-Serial and DFU Pre-programmed MCUBoot bootloader External NOR Flash by Winbond 4MB of space Max bus speed of 133MHz Standard SPI Power supply 3.3V Buck/Boost up to 0.9A of current draw Operating range 2.8 to 5.5V External LiPoly battery connection (JST SPH type) Charge rate set to 300mA with LED indication Programmer Capable of interfacing with J-Link and CMSIS-DAP based programmers Low Power RTC on board for time keeping and as a low power wakeup source. User I/O Standard feather form factor GPIOs (0.1\” pitch) 2x buttons (1 Reset, 1 General Purpose) 1x Blue LED connected to D7 Antenna connections: 1x U.FL for LTE with matching network 1x U.FL for active GPS antennas Feather form factor 58.42mm x 22.86mm (2.3\” x 0.9\”) Package Contents 1x SparkFun Thing Plus – nRF9160 1x Hologram SIM Card Resources Schematic Eagle Files Board Dimensions Hookup Guide Datasheet (nRF9160) Qwiic Info Page GitHub Hardware Repo