Nordic nRF52840 DK
The nRF52840 is Nordic's flagship for low-power wireless: Cortex-M4F at 64 MHz, BLE 5, Thread, Zigbee, native USB, NFC tag emulation, and plenty of GPIO. The DK (development kit) is the official Nordic dev-board with on-board J-Link, four buttons, four LEDs, and Arduino-shield headers.
Specs
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| MCU | ARM Cortex-M4F, 64 MHz, FPU |
| Flash | 1 MB |
| RAM | 256 KB |
| GPIO | 48 pins (P0.00–P0.31, P1.00–P1.15) — many shared with Arduino-shield headers |
| ADC | 8 channels (SAADC) |
| PWM | 4 PWM peripherals × 4 channels each = 16 hardware PWM outputs |
| I2C | 2 buses (TWI) |
| SPI | 4 buses |
| UART | 2 hardware UARTs (UARTE) |
| BLE | 5.0 — central, peripheral, observer, broadcaster |
| Thread | 1.2 |
| Zigbee | 3.0 |
| Native USB | Yes |
| NFC | Tag emulation |
| OTA | Supported via DFU service over BLE/USB |
Flashing
The DK ships with an on-board SEGGER J-Link debugger, exposed as a USB mass-storage device. Drag-drop a HEX file or flash via PlatformIO (pio run -t upload -e nrf52840_dk). The Playground supports DFU-over-USB for production boards (no J-Link needed).
Notes
- BLE transport is in development for the SDK side. For now, use the Serial transport over the on-board USB-CDC.
Adafruit_nRF52is the Arduino core for this board (notarduino-nordic). PlatformIO selects it automatically whenframework = arduino.- The 4 PWM peripherals × 4 channels means up to 16 simultaneous PWM outputs, which is generous compared to most AVR boards.
Compile flag
[env:nrf52840_dk]
platform = nordicnrf52
board = nrf52840_dk
framework = arduino