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RedBear Blend 2

The RedBear Blend 2 is a microcontroller board based on the Nordic NRF52832 Cortex-M4F MCU.

It is a “full-size” Arduino compatible board which supports most shields. It has on board a Cortex-M3 MCU that supports DAPLink, slot for Apple MFi coprocessor and two Grove connectors.

Pin Mapping

Flash Layout

The internal flash of the NRF52832 is organized as a single bank of 512Kb, with pages of 4Kb each. The flash begins at address 0x00000.

Board Summary

  • Microcontroller: NRF52832
  • Operating Voltage: 3.3V
  • Digital I/O Pins (DIO): 23
  • Analog Input Pins (ADC): 7
  • Analog Outputs Pins (DAC): 0
  • UARTs: 1
  • SPIs: 2
  • I2Cs: 2
  • Flash Memory: 512 Kb
  • SRAM: 64 Kb
  • Clock Speed: 64 MHz
  • Size (LxW mm): 69.0 x 53.0

Power

The RedBear Blend 2 can be powered via the USB connector or with an external power supply. The power source is selected automatically. External (non-USB) power can come either from an AC-to-DC adapter (such as a wall-wart) or battery, and can be connected using a 2.1mm center-positive plug connected to the board’s power jack, or directly to the GND and VIN pins.

Connect, Virtualize and Program

The RedBear Blend 2 has an on-board DAP Link circuitry that exposes three USB interfaces:

  • A serial port over USB
  • A mass storage device for drag-n-drop programming flash memory
  • A DAP compliant debug channel

DAP Link should be supported natively by all platforms. Once connected to a USB port, the RedBear Blend 2 board is recognized by Zerynth Studio. The board can be virtualized by clicking the related Studio button without requiring any other user intervention.

Follow these steps to uplink a Zerynth script on a virtualized RedBear Blend 2:

  • Select the Blend 2 on the Device Management Toolbar;
  • Register the device by clicking the “Z” button from the Zerynth Studio;
  • Create a Virtual Machine for the device by clicking the “Z” button for the second time;
  • Virtualize the device by clicking the “Z” button for the third time.

After virtualization, the device is ready to be programmed and the Zerynth scripts uploaded. Just Select the virtualized device from the “Device Management Toolbar” and click the dedicated “upload” button of Zerynth Studio and reset the device by pressing the Reset on-board button when asked.

Important

To exploit the BLE chip functionalities of the Blend 2, the lib.nordic.nrf52_ble library must be installed and imported on the Zerynth script. Moreover, in the creation phase, a VM with BLE support must be selected.