Board Support Package for the Nordic Thingy:91-nRF9160

This board support package was initially cloned from Nordic nRF9160-DK and is expected to continue to be inspired by it. Thanks to 42 Technology for their past and future work.

This crate is a Board Support Package (BSP). It wraps the HAL crate (nrf9160-hal) for the on-board nRF9160 of the Nordic Thingy:91 reference board, and provides high level wrappers for the onboard features.

Usage

You will require Rust 1.51 or higher, and the thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf target installed.

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.52.1 (9bc8c42bb 2021-05-09)
$ rustup target add thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf

To use this BSP in your own application, add as a dependency and call the Board::take() function.

Examples

To build one of the examples run:

$ git clone https://github.com/titanclass/thingy-91-nrf9160
$ cd thingy-91-nrf9160
$ cargo objcopy --target=thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf --example blinky -- -O ihex target/thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf/debug/examples/blinky.hex

If you don't have cargo-objcopy installed, run:

$ rustup component add llvm-tools-preview
$ cargo install cargo-binutils

Or you can just run objcopy manually:

$ sudo apt install binutils # provides /usr/bin/objcopy on Ubuntu
$ cargo build --target=thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf --example blinky
$ objcopy -O ihex target/thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf/debug/examples/blinky target/thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf/debug/examples/blinky.hex

Either way you can then flash the blinky.hex file using SEGGER JFlashLite, or your favourite flashing tool.

Debugging

To debug with the Thingy:91, you will need an nRF9160-DK and SWD cable. We recommend flashing a blinky app to the nRF9160-DK to provide some visual confirmation of which device is being flashed/debugged as the development provides no other visual confirmation.

The nRF9160-DK has an on-board SEGGER JLink debug probe. You need to run the SEGGER JLink-to-GDB server software, and you can then debug the board using any GDB interface.

$ /opt/SEGGER/JLink/JLinkGDBServerExe &
$ # A GUI will pop up. Select the nRF9160 device.
$ cargo build --target=thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf --example blinky
$ gdb-multiarch ./target/thumbv8m.main-none-eabihf/debug/examples/blinky
GNU gdb (Ubuntu 9.2-0ubuntu1~20.04) 9.2
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
...
Resetting target
(gdb) continue
Continuing.

Breakpoint 1, main () at examples/blinky.rs:24
24      #[entry]
(gdb) bt
#0  main () at examples/blinky.rs:24
(gdb) 

You can also follow this guide on using SEGGER J-Link with Visual Studio Code. The "device" parameter should be set to "nrf9160".

Secure vs Non-Secure

This BSP is designed to run in non-secure mode, as should most of your application code. You will therefore need a 'bootloader' which starts in secure mode, moves the required peripherals into 'non-secure' world, and then jumps to your application.

We have succesfully used Nordic's Secure Partition Manager from nRF SDK v1.5.1. SPM v1.5.1 is configured to expect your application at address 0x0004_0000 for the thingy91_nrf9160 board, and so that is what memory.x must specify as the start of Flash. Note that other version of SPM might specify a different start address!

$ west init -m https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf --mr v1.5.1 ncs
$ cd ncs
$ west update # This takes *ages*
$ cd nrf/examples/spm
$ west build --board=thingy91_nrf9160
$ west flash

Your nRF9160-DK will now have SPM installed between 0x0000_0000 and 0x0003_FFFF. Flashing your application at 0x0004_0000 should not affect SPM, provided you do not select erase entire chip or somesuch!

Licence

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.