nRF9160 Feather by Circuit Dojo

Description

The nRF9160 Feather by Jared Wolff (aka Circuit Dojo LLC) is an electronics development board. It features a Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160-SICA part. This part is capable of both CAT M1 LTE and NB-IoT for communication with the outside world. It's compatible primarily with Zephyr via the nRF Connect SDK. Other toolchains and languages coming soon to a Github repository near you.

Overview

The nRF9160 Feather is a true Feather, and then some, board. As you would expect, It works well across both USB and LiPoly batteries.

The board is designed to be nice to your batteries. Not only can you take advantage of Nordic's advanced power states, but you can also put the device into a low power standby state. Laboratory measurements are putting that mode at about 2µA of current. 2µA!

The nRF9160 Feather is also designed to take harness every last mW your battery has to offer. That means from full-to-empty it's using every last mW your battery has to offer. It runs at 3.3V and can support and work with most Featherwing boards!

Every nRF9160 Feather includes a Hologram Hyper SIM!
That's right! Thanks to Hologram, you're global-ready right out of the box.

Hologram has by my SIM of choice during the testing of the nRF9160 Feather. To top it all off, they have a robust network of cellular partners across the world.

Make sure you sign up for an account here. That way you're ready when your nRF9160 Feather hits your doorstep!

For more information about Hologram, check out their website at https://www.hologram.io

No Programmer Necessary

You can load your applications directly to the nRF9160 Feather without an external programmer. That's right, there are no extra costs associated with getting started with your nRF9160 Feather.

We've tweaked the MCUBoot boot-loader and command-line tools to boost loading speeds by 10x. This means loading via the boot-loader is nearly as fast as using an external programmer!

Open Source

The nRF9160 Feather has been reviewed and the results are in.

It now has the Open Source Hardware Association stamp of approval!

That means you're able to view the source and build on the design yourself. All the Eagle files, PDF schematic, and 3D files are available for download today at the documentation website. (see below)

Documentation

Documentation is readily available and you can access it on docs.jaredwolff.com at any time.

Hardware is licensed with CERN 1.2, firmware with Apache 2.0, and documentation with CC-SA-4.0.

Runs on Zephyr and nRF Connect SDK

The nRF9160 Feather runs on the up-and-coming RTOS. Combined with Nordic's nRF Connect SDK and you have full-fledged support. More development ecosystems coming in the future...