CLUE NRF52840 Express
by Adafruit
We wanted to build some projects that have a small screen and a lot of sensors. This board has a 1.3″ 240×240 IPS TFT display, two buttons, and sensors.
Available sensors:
- LSM series 9-DoF motion - LSM6DS33 Accel/Gyro + LIS3MDL magnetometer
- APDS9960 Proximity, Light, RGB, and Gesture Sensor
- PDM Microphone sound sensor
- Humidity, temperature and barometric environmental sensing
There’s a Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector for adding more sensors, like PM2.5 air quality and others that were too big to fit on the board.
We’ll be primarily using CircuitPython for programming it, but it will also work in Arduino.
After designing it, the board was close enough to micro:bit-shape-size that we moved a few parts to make it fit in micro:bit robots and some projects – the nrf52840 is a big upgrade chip and can do stuff like Tensorflow Lite for Microcontrollers, BLE central and peripheral, and more.
Technical details
- Nordic nRF52840 Bluetooth LE processor - 1 MB of Flash, 256 KB RAM, 64 MHz Cortex M4 processor
- 1.3″ 240x240 Color IPS TFT display for high resolution text and graphics
- Power it from any 3-6V battery source (internal regulator and protection diodes)
- Two A/B user buttons and one reset button
- RGB NeoPixel indicator LED
- 2 MB internal flash storage for datalogging, images, fonts or CircuitPython code
- Buzzer/speaker for playing tones and beeps
- Two bright white LEDs in front for illumination/color sensing.
Tutorials
Purchase
Contribute
Have some info to add for this board? Edit the source for this page here.
CircuitPython 9.2.1
This is the latest stable release of CircuitPython that will work with the CLUE NRF52840 Express.
Use this release if you are new to CircuitPython.
On nRF boards, CircuitPython 8.2.0 and later require UF2 bootloader version 0.6.1 or later. Older bootloaders cannot load the firmware. See Update UF2 Bootloader below.
Built-in modules available: _asyncio, _bleio, _pixelmap, adafruit_bus_device, adafruit_pixelbuf, aesio, alarm, analogio, array, atexit, audiobusio, audiocore, audiomixer, audiomp3, audiopwmio, binascii, bitbangio, bitmapfilter, bitmaptools, board, builtins, builtins.pow3, busdisplay, busio, busio.SPI, busio.UART, codeop, collections, countio, digitalio, displayio, epaperdisplay, errno, fontio, fourwire, framebufferio, getpass, gifio, i2cdisplaybus, io, jpegio, json, keypad, keypad.KeyMatrix, keypad.Keys, keypad.ShiftRegisterKeys, keypad_demux, keypad_demux.DemuxKeyMatrix, locale, math, memorymap, microcontroller, msgpack, neopixel_write, nvm, onewireio, os, os.getenv, paralleldisplaybus, pulseio, pwmio, rainbowio, random, re, rgbmatrix, rotaryio, rtc, sdcardio, select, sharpdisplay, storage, struct, supervisor, synthio, sys, terminalio, time, touchio, traceback, ulab, usb_cdc, usb_hid, usb_midi, vectorio, warnings, watchdog, zlib
Features: Display, Bluetooth/BTLE, Solder-Free Alligator Clip, STEMMA QT/QWIIC
Absolute Newest
Every time we commit new code to CircuitPython we automatically build binaries for each board and language. The binaries are stored on Amazon S3, organized by board, and then by language. These releases are even newer than the development release listed above. Try them if you want the absolute latest and are feeling daring or want to see if a problem has been fixed.
Previous Versions of CircuitPython
All previous releases of CircuitPython are available for download from Amazon S3 through the button below. For very old releases, look in the OLD/ folder for each board. Release notes for each release are available at GitHub button below.
Older releases are useful for testing if you something appears to be broken in a newer release but used to work, or if you have older code that depends on features only available in an older release. Otherwise we recommend using the latest stable release.
Update UF2 Bootloader
Latest version: 0.9.2
The bootloader allows you to load CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino programs. The bootloader is not CircuitPython. You can check the current version of your bootloader by looking in the INFO_UF2.TXT file when the BOOT drive is visible (FEATHERBOOT, CPLAYBOOT, etc.).
It is not necessary to update your bootloader if it is working fine. Read the release notes on GitHub to see what has been changed. In general, we recommend you not update the bootloader unless you know there is a problem with it or a support person has asked you to try updating it.
On nRF boards, CircuitPython 8.2.0 and later require UF2 bootloader version 0.6.1 or later. Older bootloaders cannot load the firmware. To check the version of your board's bootloader, look at INFO_UF2.TXT when the BOOT drive is present. To update the bootloader, refer to the "Update Bootloader" page in the guide for your board, or start with this page.
After you update, check INFO_UF2.TXT to verify that the bootloader version has been updated. Then you will need to reload CircuitPython.