Adafruit has this week announced the arrival of the Particle Xenon mesh-enabled development board that can act as either a standalone endpoint or repeater for Particle Mesh networks. Priced at just $19.95 the Particle Xenon board is based on the Nordic nRF52840, the BLE Cortex M4 with a ton of Flash, RAM and peripherals, including native USB support.
Adafruit explains a little more about the new arrival. “Like all Particle Mesh boards, it even has built-in battery charging circuitry so it’s easy to connect a Li-Poly battery (not included but we stock lots here at the ‘fruit) and deploy your local network in minutes. The Xenon is great for connecting sensors, motors, pumps, valves, and points of data-interest. Pair it with an Argon or Boron gateway to osmosis all that great data into the Device Cloud.
You might be looking at this dev board and thinking “Hey wow you know it kinda looks like a Feather!” Well you’ve won a fabulous prize because it is in fact Feather compatible! Yes, the brilliant engineers at Particle checked out our Feather spec, and made something that is pin compatible so you can use our massive collection of FeatherWings to add more capabilities. (Please note that there may not be Particle Mesh libraries for all the hardware we make, if you’re not sure, check with them to see if there’s a driver available for their IDE)”
Specifications of the Particle Xenon development Board :
– Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 SoC
– ARM Cortex-M4F 32-bit processor @ 64MHz
– 1MB flash, 256KB RAM
– IEEE 802.15.4-2006: 250 Kbps
– Bluetooth 5: 2 Mbps, 1 Mbps, 500 Kbps, 125 Kbps
– Supports DSP instructions, HW accelerated Floating Point Unit (FPU) calculations
– ARM TrustZone CryptoCell-310 Cryptographic and security module
– Up to +8 dBm TX power (down to -20 dBm in 4 dB steps)
– NFC-A tag
– On-board additional 2MB SPI flash
– 20 mixed signal GPIO (6 x Analog, 8 x PWM), UART, I2C, SPI
– Micro USB 2.0 full speed (12 Mbps)
– Integrated Li-Po charging and battery connector
– JTAG (SWD) Connector
– RGB status LED
– Reset and Mode buttons
– On-board PCB antenna
– U.FL connector for external antenna
– Meets the Feather specification in dimensions and pinout
– FCC, CE and IC certified
– RoHS compliant (lead-free)
Source: Adafruit