For light relief from hacking, I looked over the eval board David gave me, and decided to see what was better about it, compared to the nRF51822. I see four significant advantages.
Highlights
- Power consumption is about 5x (sic) better
- Double the memory.
- It looks like it might be possible to have multiple SPI channels active, so avoiding multiplexing.
- BLE TX/RX use 60% power, or better.
Key features
2.4 GHz transceiver
- -96 dBm sensitivity in Bluetooth® low energy mode (3dBm better)
- 1 Mbps, 2 Mbps supported data rates
- TX Power -20 to +4 dBm in 4 dB steps
- Single pin antenna interface
- 5.5 mA peak current in RX and TX (0 dBm) (was 9.7 Rx/8 Tx)
- RSSI (1 dB resolution)
ARM® Cortex™-M4 32-bit processor with FPU, 64 MHz
- 52 μA/MHz running from flash memory (was 275 μA/MHz running from flash memory)
- 48 μA/MHz running from RAM (150 μA/MHz running from RAM)
- Data Watchpoint and Trace (DWT), Embedded Trace Macrocell (ETM), and Instrumentation Trace Macro cell (ITM)
- Serial Wire Debug (SWD)
- Trace port
Flexible Power Management
- Supply voltage range 1.7 V to 3.6 V – (was 1.8 V to 3.6 V)
- Fully automatic LDO and DC/DC regulator system
- Fast wake-up using 64 MHz internal oscillator
- 0.4 μA at 3 V in OFF mode (was 0.6)
- 0.7μA at 3 V in OFF mode with 32 kB RAM retention (was 1.2uA)
- 1.9 μA at 3 V in ON mode, 32.768 kHz crystal oscillator and Real Time Counter running with 32 kB RAM retention