Porting an application developed for the nRF9160 DK to a custom hardware incorporating the nRF9160 SiP

[Sebastian Stein]

Dear Nordic-Support-Team,

I (software developer) work together with an electrical engineer to develop a device, which will incorporate the nRF9160 SiP. The firmware/application development is nearly at its end and the hardware development will start soon. Until now, I developed the application for the nRF9160 DK using the SEGGER Embedded Studio and its features for building and flashing it.

I am aware of the following documentation and have read parts of it:

• Nordic Infocenter
• nRF Connect SDK

However, I was not able to get a complete picture of how to port an existing application, which was written for the nRF9160 DK, to a custom hardware incorporating the nRF9160 SiP.

I would really appreciate it if you could provide something like a cheat sheet or checklist containing the necessary steps and pitfalls one has to be aware of when trying to accomplish the aforementioned feat.

Furthermore it would be great if you could tell me which parts of the documentation my colleague has to read to start with the hardware layout. Will the nRF9160 Hardware Design Guidelines be sufficient?

Thank you very much for you help!

[Simon]

Check out the NCS tutorial and section 2. Using a custom board with NCS. Jump straight to 2.2 Walkthrough to get to the practical part.

Check out the Board Porting Guide as well. You will find that in the Zephyr documentation, which you can get to in the following manner:

By the way, the 2.2 Walkthrough only shows how to create a new custom board folder, that you can use as a base for your specific board. It does not show how to add additional functionality to your board. I will add a new section to the tutorial soon, that go through some different scenarios. Something like this:

• If your board only has one button, connected to GPIO 30
  • Then you have to remove the other button instances, and change the GPIO of button1 to 30 (instead of 8)
• If you have an adxl362 device on you board, connected to some specific GPIOs
  • Then you could look at the board folder for the Thingy:91 to see how to add it to the board folder. Change the SPI instance if you want to use another, and select the pins according to how the adxl362 is connected.
  • Then you can build the adxl362 sample with your custom board name and it should work out of the box
  • (Be aware that this can also get added to an overlay file, but if the sensor is part of the custom board, the proper way is to add it to the dts board files)
• If you don't have an nrf52840 on your custom board
  • Show what should be removed. E.g. interface_to_nrf52840, nrf52840_reset++

 

Furthermore it would be great if you could tell me which parts of the documentation my colleague has to read to start with the hardware layout. Will the nRF9160 Hardware Design Guidelines be sufficient?

 I will get back to you tomorrow about this

Best regards,

Simon

[Sebastian Stein]

Hi Simon,

thank you very much for your help. This is exactly what I was looking for.

I am looking forward to read the new sections as soon as they are ready. I am especially interested in the last point:

Simon said:

If you don't have an nrf52840 on your custom board

• Show what should be removed.

Thanks again,

Sebastian

[Simon]

Sebastian Stein said:

I am looking forward to read the new sections as soon as they are ready. I am especially interested in the last point:

In the meanwhile you could look at some other custom boards, based on the nRFf9160 and without the nRF52840. E.g. the Circuit Dojo Feather Board: zephyr/boards/arm/circuitdojo_feather_nrf9160.

Best regards,

Simon

[Sebastian Stein]

That is good to know. Thank you for the hint.

Cheers,

Sebastian