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DZone > IoT Zone > nRF24L01+ 2.4 GHz Wireless Connectivity With the tinyK20 Board

nRF24L01+ 2.4 GHz Wireless Connectivity With the tinyK20 Board

This will teach you how to set up a board with low power.

Erich Styger user avatar by
Erich Styger
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Jul. 27, 16 · IoT Zone · Tutorial
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Hello and welcome! Today, I'm running you through what I used to create a low-power board for my projects. I'm using the tiny and inexpensive Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ transceiver (see "Tutorial: Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board") in many projects. It costs less than $3 and allows me to communicate with a proprietary 2.4GHz protocol in a low-power way (see "IoT: FreeRTOS Down to the Micro Amps"). I have that transceiver now running with the tinyK20 board, too:

Image title

nRF24L01+ Transceiver With tinyK20

The normal 2×3 pin rows of the transceiver module are not very bread board friendly. I have used the following connections to the nRF module:

  • SPI MISO: PTC7
  • SPI MOSI: PTC6
  • SPI SCK: PTC5
  • CE: PTC2
  • CSN: PTD1
  • IRQ: not connected
  • 3.3V: 3.3V
  • GND: GND

Image title

tinyK20 nRF24L01+ Connection

The project is for Eclipse (NXP Kinetis Design Studio) and is using the RNet wireless network stack:

Image title

nRF24L01+ Project for tinyK20

For easier portability to other microcontrollers, the project is using Processor Expert components, which encapsulate the low-level drives and software stacks including the RTOS:

Image title

nRF24L01+ Components

The project includes a command line interface (38400 baud, 8N1) to send and receive messages, to do remote command execution and to inspect the status of the transceiver using Segger RTT. Plus it includes a wireless packet sniffer.

Image title

Command Line Shell with Segger RTT

Alternatively, a USB CDC or UART (serial) connection can be used.

I'm not going much into details how to use the nRF24L01+, RNet and all the other components. Check the links at the end of this article for more details.

Summary

With this project I have the tinyK20 board enabled with 2.4 GHz wireless connectivity for less than $3 using the Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ transceiver. I plan to use this in one of my next projects which need to have all board components in a small enclosure. Here, the tinyK20 fits well.

The sources of this project are available on GitHub here: https://github.com/ErichStyger/mcuoneclipse/tree/master/Examples/KDS/tinyK20/tinyK20_nrf

Command-line interface Command (computing) Connection (dance) Service provider interface Execution (computing) USB Eclipse GitHub Interface (computing) remote

Published at DZone with permission of Erich Styger, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

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