Seeed XIAO BLE nRF52840

As the first wireless product in the Seeed XIAO family, Seeed XIAO BLE has equipped a powerful Nordic nRF52840 MCU which is designed in a Bluetooth 5.0 module, built around 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M4 CPU with Floating-Point Unit(FPU) operating at 64Mhz.

Note: This product will not support Zigbee. Initial documentation and promotional material from Seeed suggested that it would, however as seen on this forum post, Seeed have retracted these statements.

Even with the added capability of a wireless connection, it still retains the Seeed XIAO series classic form-factor of small and exquisite which can be used for wearable devices and Internet of Things projects. In terms of power, it only uses 5μA in deep sleep and supports battery charge management thanks to the BQ25101 chip. 

Compared to XIAO RP2040, the XIAO BLE has a richer interface. The first thing to note is that the Near Field Communication (NFC) is functional on the board. Secondly, there is a tiny and elegant reset button on one side of the Type-C interface. On the other side is a three-in-one LED along with power LED. There are 11 digital IO that can be used as PWM pins and 6 analog IO that can be used as ADC pins. The board supports UART, IIC, and SPI all three common serial ports. Just like the XIAO RP2040, it has an onboard 2 MB flash which means it can also be programmed by Arduino, MicroPython, CircuitPython, or other program languages.

If you are interested in programming embedded machine learning, Seeed have Codecraft graphic programming that can help you quickly start your own TinyML project. They have also set up a #tinyml channel on their Discord server, please click to join for 24/7 making, sharing, discussing, and helping each other out.

The XIAO BLE is compatible with the XIAO expansion board. We also stock the Seeed XIAO BLE nRF52840 Sense!

All the I/O pins are 3.3V, please do not input more than 3.3V or the CPU may be damaged.

Features

• Powerful CPU: Nordic nRF52840, ARM® Cortex™-M4 32-bit processor with FPU operating at 64 MHz
• Wireless capabilities: Bluetooth 5.0, NFC
• Ultra-small size: 21 x 17.5mm, Seeed Xiao series classic form-factor for wearable devices
• Ultra-low sleep power: 5 μA, deep sleep model
• Battery charging chip: BQ25101 chip supported lithium battery charge management
• Rich interface: 1x Reset button, Ix UART, 1x IIC, 1x SPI, 1x NFC, 1x SWD, 11x GPIO, 6x ADC, 1x Three-in-one LED,1x User LED
• Onboard 2 MB flash
• Single-sided components, surface mounting design
• Product number: Seeed 102010448

Specifications

Resources

• XIAO BLE Wiki
• BQ25101 Datasheet
• Nano BLE MCU-nRF52840 PS v1.1
• Bottom-pad-positioning
• Seeed XIAO nRF52840 v1.0 SCH
• Flash_P25Q16H-UXH-IR_Datasheet
• Seeed XIAO BLE nRF52840 BLE Communication Distance Test Report
• XIAO-nRF52840 CE | FCC | MIC
• Control a WS2812B LED strip with the XIAO BLE

Pinout