Nordic Thingy 91 behavior

[Alejandro Chavez]

Hi everyone!

I'm new in Nordic DKs and I have a new Nordic Thingy 91, I understand that it uses two chips: nRF9160 and nRF52840.

Maybe this is a silly question but, can those two chips be used at the same time or do I have to select and work with only one?

Thanks in advance.

[Øyvind]

Hello, 

I understand that it uses two chips: nRF9160 and nRF52840.

Yes, this is correct. The Thingy:91 Nordic Thingy:91 integrates the nRF9160 SiP, supporting LTE-M, NB-IoT and GPS, and the nRF52840 SoC, supporting Bluetooth Low Energy and Near Field Communication (NFC) passive tag.

can those two chips be used at the same time or do I have to select and work with only one?

 These work independently at the same time. The nRF52840 acts as a communication bridge, using Connectivity Bridge, between the PC and nRF9160 which is the main device. The nRF9160 is running the Asset Tracking application out of the box.

Please see our nRF Connect SDK documentation, especially the Working with Thingy:91 user guide and the Thingy:91 documentation, for more information.

Kind regards,
Øyvind

[Alejandro Chavez]

Thanks Øyvind! Excellent!

So, could i control externally available GPIOs (nRF52840) via NB-IoT (nRF9160) without any problems?

[Øyvind]

Alejandro Chavez said:

So, could i control externally available GPIOs (nRF52840) via NB-IoT (nRF9160) without any problems?

 Yes, if you program the devices correctly, this is possible

[Alejandro Chavez]

Thanks again Øyvind, i just want to recicle the Asset Tracker application that it's currently running but including one function that sets one of GPIOs as 1 (logically True) or 0 (logically False) when the device receives in an specific topic a message like {"lights":"on"}.

Could I do something like that?
What would you recommendations be?
How can I set as 1 or 0 an specific GPIO from the main.c?

[Øyvind]

Alejandro Chavez said:

What would you recommendations be?

 I do not recommend starting with the Asset Tracker, as this is a full application to showcase the nRF9160 - and is far more advanced. I would recommend looking at our Simple MQTT sample to send simple on or off message. To implement a button, you could have a look at the Button sample in the Zephyr samples. Or you can look at the nRF91 nrfx example :"Button 1 is configured to create an event when pushed"

Many of our nRF9160 samples are good starting points compared to the Asset Tracker. which incorporates too much as a starting point to learn.