I’m going to touch VERY briefly on two boards I just picked up from Seeed Studio.Very briefly because I thought they’d be running on ESP32 chips – but they aren’t – I guess the giveaway is in the name (nRF52840) Here they are, the demos are very pretty indeed but as my go-to development software is ESPHOME it’ll be a while before I can familiarize myself with the tools to do something with these.Both boards (they have 3 different sizes) are very similar but for the 1.47″ Touch display versus the 0.96″ display on the smaller board.
Both have connectors for 3v7 rechargeable batteries and both have USB-connectors for charging or no-battery operation.Both boards fully support their full colour displays, built-in movement and gyro sensors, battery status, backlight control and microphone – and the demos with which the boards come ready-fitted do a great job of showing off the sensors.Both have TAP sensors though I could not seem to get consistent operation there- everything else was fine.
One important point I nearly missed: the XIAO nRF52840 Plus is not a Wi-Fi device.The nRF52840 provides Bluetooth/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity, but there is no Wi-Fi hardware on the board.That means these boards are rather different from the ESP32-based XIAO boards I’ve been using recently.
In particular, they can’t provide the Wi-Fi-based features I’m used to with ESPHome, such as a web interface, network connectivity or OTA updates.It seems however thst by msking use of one of my BLE proxies I should be able to get the Xiao-nRF52850-Plus boards talking to Home Assistant – time will tell.
Read More
