Add Xiao nRF52840 (Sense) board support

[maxgerhardt]

Fixes #142.

Based on https://medium.com/@alwint3r/working-with-seeed-xiao-ble-sense-and-platformio-ide-5c4da3ab42a3.

As requested in https://community.platformio.org/t/support-for-seeeduino-xiao-ble-board/28420.

Uses the latest core version as defined in the Arduino package manifest referenced in https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/XIAO_BLE/#software-setup.

Adds xiaoblesense and xiaoble as available boards. (Difference is, the "Sense" version has a IMU and microphone sensors per this).

Adds the Seeed version of framework-mbed as a new package, framework-mbed-seeed with version "2.8.1". Adaptions in the builder script are done according to maxgerhardt/builder-framework-arduino-core-mbed@abb229f.

Further adds framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52-seeed variant of framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52 and adds dedicated board files for the Adafruit varaint of the board used with the "1.0.0" core.

Suggested course of action:

• Add https://github.com/maxgerhardt/framework-mbed-seeed.git to the PlatformIO registry under the PlatformIO owner
• same for https://github.com/maxgerhardt/framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52-seeed.git
• merge Add detection of Xiao boards builder-framework-arduino-core-mbed#7
• merge Recongize Seeed variant for nrf52 core builder-framework-arduino-nrf5#13
• update submodule reference (two-level, https://github.com/platformio/builder-framework-arduino-nrf5 -> https://github.com/platformio/builder-framework-arduino-core-mbed/tree/master, then this repo ->builder-framework-arduino-nrf5)
• I will then adapt the submodule references and package source for framework-mbed-seeed here
• then this PR can be merged

This PR can be tested by using the platformio.ini

[env]
platform = https://github.com/maxgerhardt/platform-nordicnrf52
framework = arduino

[env:xiaoblesense_arduinocore_mbed]
board = xiaoblesense

[env:xiaoblesense_adafruit_nrf52]
board = xiaoblesense_adafruit

[env:xiaoble_arduinocore_mbed]
board = xiaoble

[env:xiaoble_adafruit_nrf52]
board = xiaoble_adafruit

[maxgerhardt]

Works on hardware per this report.

[vlad-the-compiler]

Thanks for the contribution!
I see you've adopted Seeed's Mbed-based implementation, which is forked from the original Nano 33 BLE (Sense) BSP.
Seeed themselves have 2 BSPs for the Xiao BLE (Sense) series, v1.0.0 being forked from Adafruit's FreeRTOS implementation bundled with their excellent Bluefruit libraries that support higher-level functionality such as HID, MIDI, etc, compared to the barebones original ArduinoBLE library.
According to Seeed themselves, v1.0.0 is recommended in case one wishes to leverage the Bluefruit functionalities.
Could there be a way to support both v1.0.0 (FreeRTOS + Bluefruit) and the official Arduino implementation (what has been forked for this PR, based on the latest version for the Seeed core)? I would definitely look into it myself, but I've got no experience with adding support for boards/frameworks in PIO.
To clarify, I do not mean supporting them at the same time, but as different BSPs for the Xiao nRF52 boards under PlatformIO.

[maxgerhardt]

This PR is based on the ArduinoCore-mbed fork of Seeed, not the Adafruit nRF52 fork.

But indeed I now see that there are two packages

			{
				"name": "Seeed nRF52 Boards",
				"architecture": "nrf52",
				"version": "2.6.1",
				"category": "Contributed",
				"url": "https://files.seeedstudio.com/arduino/core/nRF52840/nrf52840_05202022_2.6.1.tar.bz2",
				"archiveFileName": "nrf52840_05202022_2.6.1.tar.bz2",
				"checksum": "SHA-256:32A4544728E9C9E234BA7A2F0719019F1FD5AD5A204BCE1227EC2E20F265C4BB",
				"size": "31600049",
				"boards": [{
					"name": "Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense"
				}],
...
			{
				"name": "Seeed nRF52 Boards",
				"architecture": "nrf52",
				"version": "1.0.0",
				"category": "Contributed",
				"url": "https://files.seeedstudio.com/arduino/core/nRF52840/Arduino_core_nRF52840.tar.bz2",
				"archiveFileName": "Arduino_core_nRF52840.tar.bz2",
				"checksum": "SHA-256:2754015D46A2EF7A8CF2727F5459BC8C5CAD9F73A7E69A130AC744D39BECEF77",
				"size": "49463833",
},
....

What an extremely bad way to name board packages. If there's a 1.0.0 version and a 2.6.1 version, I won't even look at the 1.0.0 version for integration. But indeed, the 1.0.0 core is indeed an entirely different core (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino).

I'll have a look at adding this. Not sure if I want to add another board = .. option to this or a special core switching logic via board_build.core, which would be more in-line with other PlatformIO integrations where a board supports multiple different arduino cores.

[vlad-the-compiler]

What an extremely bad way to name board packages

Pretty much. I'd imagine they thought about maintaining the 2 varaints under the 1.x and 2.x versioning, so an upstream bugfix/feature addition for 1.0.0 would yield an updated BSP package under e.g. 1.0.1, but since Arduino BSPs never do this, this is just asking for trouble.
Maybe they wanted to avoid naming Adafruit for whatever legal reason and resorted to the confusing 1.x / 2.x system as a consequence? I don't think Adafruit would go after them for forking their open-source Arduino BSP, though.

[leroyle]

I also would like to see the Adafruit runtime support.
My observations/understandings subject to correction by anyone more knowlegeable:
It seems to wiggle with v 1.3.0 though I've not tried any of the Nordic SoftDevice functionality.
Other than porting the variants pin definition code the other major thing I hit was a SoftDevice version mismatch between what the Seeed bootloader is built with by default (Seems to be 7.3.0) and what the Adafruit runtime is built with by default, 6.1.1.

The Adafruit runtime uses FreeRTOS under the covers, thus an RTOS task is run to execute the "Arduino" setup()/loop(), don't know about the mbed runtime.
If the Softdevice versions do no match the inital RTOS task will not start and you end up in the weeds with a Hard Fault. has to do with locating the correct SVC_Handler() within the Adafruit runtime. The addressing for this is Softdevice version specific.
(The actual SVC instruction that kicks off the start of the first RTOS task should also change a bit from "SVC 0" to SVC "3" or some other non interfering value. I believe 0 is reserved for SoftDevice use)

As mentioned it does wiggle with SoftDevice 6.1.1, I have yet to try rebuilding bootloader/runtime with Softdevice version 7.3.0.

I've not discussed this with Seeed at all to see if they might have a heart ache with support tickets re the Adafruit runtime.
Edit..
Does seem to wiggle with SoftDevice 7.3.0.

https://github.com/leroyle/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino/tree/leroyle
A fork of the Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino repo with my above changes incorporated into branch "leroyle". PlatformIO board definition is "xiaoblesense" as in:
[env]
platform = nordicnrf52
board = xiaoblesense
framework = arduino
...
TODO: create a separate board definition for "Xiao BLE" vs "Xiao BLE Sense"
The current pin definition incarnation is for the non "Sense" version
Probably needs to be a separate issue of incorporating AdaFrutit runtime.

[aovestdipaperino]

What's blocking this PR?

[maxgerhardt]

I've updated the Seed ArduinoCore-mbed version from 2.6.1 to 2.8.1 and added support for building for the "1.0.0" core, aka the Adafruit nRF52 core fork, by using the dedicated board definitions xiaoble_adafruit and xiaoblesense_adafruit .

I also had to make an update to the extra_script.py of the Adafruit nRF Crypto library to make it compile with the latest PIO version.

Blinky and BLE examples are at https://github.com/maxgerhardt/pio-xiao-ble-test.

[FernandoPerezLara]

LGTM!

[mike1808]

Tested the latest update. It works great!

[vlad-the-compiler]

Sounds like a merge is in order.

[projectitis]

Would love to be able to use this board with PIO!

[nachocpol]

Great work! Would be awesome to use this board with PIO (dito!) 😄

[maxgerhardt]

Hm I see the full picture now, the new 1.1.1 core does define that macro by itself.

maxgerhardt/framework-arduinoadafruitnrf52-seeed@3ae21c3#diff-cb7f085ad29408821e4beac17a66977e6016fb818c03a905f2d80a7b59f76b48

I just updated the core. So if you do

pio pkg update -g -p "https://github.com/maxgerhardt/platform-nordicnrf52"

in a PlatformIO Core CLI, then it you should not even need the above build_flags addition.

[Xarbenence]

Oh I see. It has this macro

https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Seeed_Arduino_LSM6DS3/blob/997df38fc15beeb2402232ba1ba5ff82b3296b7b/LSM6DS3.cpp#L35-L37

but maybe that's not set. Can you just add

build_flags = -DTARGET_SEEED_XIAO_NRF52840_SENSE

to the platformio.ini and retry?

That did it! Thanks, Max. Much appreciated.

[DoomHammer]

Is there a way to solve Could not find the package with 'https://github.com/maxgerhardt/platform-nordicnrf52' requirements for your system 'darwin_arm64'?

[maxgerhardt]

That should not appear. Are you 100% using the platformio.ini above?

[DoomHammer]

Sorry, I might've gotten lost in the conversation. Which ini are you referring to?

[maxgerhardt]

If you have created a new blank PlatformIO project (doesn't matter with which board or framework), you should have in your VSCode file explorer a platformio.ini file in it. That stores the entire configuration of the PlatformIO project. Depending on which board or core you want to use, you copy in the platformio.ini I posted in bottom of the PR decsription, use it to replace your platformio.ini and delete the [env:xxx] sections you don't need.

[maxgerhardt]

I updated my branch to the latest develop to resolve all the conflicts and the CI passes.

Can PlatformIO staff please look at this PR? This has been open since Jun 22, 2022 now and nothing should be blocking it :(

[mrWheel]

@maxgerhardt

Thanks for your work on the Seeed XIAO BLE board stuff.

I’m using the Seeed XIAO BLE with this setup and it works great.

But now I want to get the chip to sleep or indeed set it in low power mode. All examples I can find are based on Adafruit libraries that are a real PIA because a simple program needs SPI, SoftwareSerial and so on. I don’t like Adafruit libraries.

Are you still developing for/with the nRF52840 chips and can you lead me to some libraries that will work in this setup without all the Adafruit overhead?

For now just BLE, low power modes and interrupt handling (from timers, BLE or gpio pins)..

[maxgerhardt]

I don't even have a single Seeed XIAO board, so I'd recommend to redirect the question to https://forum.seeedstudio.com/ or the Adafruit library repo on how to reduce the dependencies. The dependencies might however also not be "real" in the sense that PlatformIO includes them when really they're behind some #ifdef MACRO that is actually false. You can counteract that with one of the other lib_ldf_mode values.

[leroyle]

@mrWheel, if you don't want the overhead of the Arduino libs then you might take a look at using the nordic build tools or Zephyr. both with the newer NRF Connect SDK if you are just getting started, rather than PlatformIO or Arduino.

It does look like they have a steeper learning curve though.

As an aside in my experience the nordic files contained in the Adafruit runtime are out of sync with the current version of nRF SDK and of course the newer nRF Connect, a few api are incompatible, how many to what extent I did not go down that rabbit hole.

In trying to incorporate the Memfault SDK I had to manipulate include paths so the Memfault code built against the Nordic version while the Adafruit libs built against the Adafruit version. This is a just for grins project that I would not recommend for real work.

Bottom line might be if you like the Arduino environment and it not being real bleeding edge, yet. Stick with PIO/Arduino. If not then check out Zepher. Admittedly I know little about that environment but it's on my list and looks to be actively supported by Nordic.

That said I have no idea if bringing Nordic support upto date in either PIO or Arduino is being worked or is on anyone's radar.

[mrWheel]

@maxgerhardt & @leroyle

Thanks for your reply’s.
Recently I changed from ArduinoIDE to Visiual Studio Code/platformio.
I’m used to Atmel and Espressif which both have great support for there products. Nordic seems not to be interested in the Makers Community which is, I think, a missed change.

I don’t think I will investigate more time in the nRF52840 chips as every board has his own quirks and the information over bootloaders, soft devices and what not is very poor.

Regards

[doh38]

Why the heck this needed addition hasn't been merged? -.-'

[QuantumCypher]

Can this get merged?

[harrison-denton]

Any update on a merge? @FernandoPerezLara

[zholdak]

Many people wait for this request will be merged... Why still not merged? Any reason?

[vlad-the-compiler]

I've noticed people addressing the issue of merging by pinging the current reviewer of this PR.

Only members of the PIO organization can merge, if we wish to get this merged we have to bring them up to speed with the fact that the work for this is done.

That being said, @ivankravets this PR has been looking good for some time, perhaps we could get it merged. Thank you in advance!

[black-ghost-off]

@ivankravets , any updates about this merge?

[mohammad-askari]

@maxgerhardt, any chance of updating either (Adafruit / mbed) cores for this board? Both are outdated, and official support is non-existent after so long. I even attempted doing so myself, however, I ran into similar issues as explained here, which I could not fix.

The problem I had recently with the board was that hardware interrupts were causing it to freeze using the Adafruit variant, and it took me hours to fix. The issue was resolved once I used Arduino IDE to upload a sample code based on the recent version (1.1.8), and switching back to PlatformIO.

[tomasz90]

This PR is 2 years old, can you merge it finally?

[Amidair]

Please add Xiao nRF52840 (Sense) board support! Hundreds of people are waiting for this nRF52 jewel to be supported by PlatformIO...

[morgankenyon]

For anyone having issues with platformio and the Xiao nRF52840 Sense board, here is a fairly simple blink example showing the setup required to get it working.

I followed Max's original instructions and had to play around a little bit.

https://github.com/morgankenyon/OpenDataDisc/tree/main/software/examples/11_nrf52_blink

[limengdu]

@valeros Could you please take a look at this? We really need it.

[NicolARun06]

Oh I see. It has this macro

https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Seeed_Arduino_LSM6DS3/blob/997df38fc15beeb2402232ba1ba5ff82b3296b7b/LSM6DS3.cpp#L35-L37

but maybe that's not set. Can you just add

build_flags = -DTARGET_SEEED_XIAO_NRF52840_SENSE

to the platformio.ini and retry?

Maybe just like this, when I was referencing the sample code of seeed-mic (https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Seeed_Arduino_Mic/blob/master/examples/mic_Saved_OnSDcard/mic_Saved_OnSDcard.ino) and realized that successfully compiling it requires adding the definition of "ARDUINO_ARCH_NRF52840" to platformio.ini.

[paulhayes]

Another nudge to get the fork merged in. I've been using it successfully on projects.