What is it?

The nRF52840 Dongle is a small, low-cost USB dongle that supports Bluetooth® Low Energy 5, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, ZigBee, 802.15.4, ANT and 2.4 GHz proprietary protocols. The Dongle is the perfect target hardware for use with nRF Connect for Desktop as it is low-cost but still supports all the short-range wireless standards used with Nordic devices. The dongle has been designed to be used as a wireless HW device together with nRF Connect for Desktop as well as programming through nRFUtil. For other use cases please do note that there is no debug support on the Dongle, only support for programming the device and communicating through USB. It can also be used to develop code for the nRF52840 SoC mounted on the dongle. Programming is supported through a USB-enabled bootloader. Connectors for external debuggers are available. It is supported by most of the nRF Connect for Desktop APPs and will automatically be programmed if needed. In addition, custom applications can be compiled and downloaded to the Dongle. It has a user-programmable RGB LED, a green LED, a user-programmable button as well as 15 GPIO accessible from castellated solder points along the edge. Example applications are available in the nRF5 SDK under the board name PCA10059.

Parameters

RF-DG-40A SoC: nRF52840

Features

• 2 Mbps
• Long Range
• Advertising Extensions
• Channel Selection Algorithm #2 (CSA #2)

IEEE 802.15.4 radio support

• Thread
• ZigBee

ARM® CortexTM-M4 with floating point support

• 15 GPIO available via edge castellation
• USB interface direct to nRF52840 SoC
• Integrated 2.4 GHz PCB antenna
• 1 user-programmable button
• 1 user-programmable RGB LED
• 1 user-programmable LED
• 1.7 V ~ 5.5 V operation from USB or external
• NFC available

Applications

• Advanced wearables
• IoT
• Interactive entertainment devices

Useful Links

• RF-DG-40A nRF52840 datasheet

Reference Resource

• What Is A USB Dongle?
• Six Pros of RF-star NRF52840 Dongle
• RF-star Low energy BLE 5.0 nRF52832 USB Dongle Sniffer