Advanced Wearables Challenge with Nordic Semiconductor and Hackster

Hackster.io is running an Advanced Wearables design challenge in partnership with Nordic Semiconductor. Participation is free and Nordic is giving away 50+50 bundles of hardware to eligible idea submissions. There are two challenges and two bundles of hardware. Bundle A includes Nordic’s latest nRF5340 DK BLE5 development board, Adafruit 2.2″ TFT Display and nRF52840 Dongle. The Challenge A – Dream Smart Wearables – is to build and document smart wearable devices of any kind using the bundled hardware. You can participate even if you did not win the giveaway. You can purchase the hardware yourself and complete the project.

Challenge B – Remote Patient Monitoring – is to build smart wearable devices for remote patient monitoring. For example, devices that measure body temperature, heart rate etc. Bundle B includes nRF5340 DK, Power Profiler Kit II + nRF52840 Dongle. The dongle is a complementary part and does not need to be used in the project. It is useful for debugging BLE communication.

Submitting a short demonstration video can gain you bonus point and may increase your chance of winning. The Grand Prize is a $2,000 value VISA gift card, and winners of other two categories get $500 each. Additionally, 15 runner-up projects will receive T-shirt, swag and surprise hardware from Hackster.

nRF5340

nRF5340 is the latest Bluetooth 5.2 SoC from Nordic Semiconductor. It has improved features and integrates two Arm® Cortex®-M33 cores. One core is dedicated for custom application code and the other for network operations. Key features are,

• High-performance application processor
  • 128/64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 with FPU and DSP instructions
  • 1 MB Flash + 512 KB RAM
  • 8 KB 2-way set associative cache
• Fully-programmable network processor
  • 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 with 2KB instruction cache
  • 256 KB Flash + 64 KB RAM
• Next level security
  • Trusted execution with Arm TrustZone
  • Hardware accelerated cryptography with Arm CryptoCell-312
  • Secure Key Storage
  • Secure bootloader with root-of-trust and DFU
• Bluetooth Low Energy
  • Bluetooth 5.2
  • LE Audio
  • Direction Finding
  • 2 Mbps, Advertising Extensions and Long Range
• Bluetooth mesh
• Thread, Zigbee and 802.15.4
• NFC
• Full range of digital interfaces with EasyDMA
  • Full-speed USB
  • 96 MHz encrypted QSPI
  • 32 MHz high-speed SPI
• 105 °C extended operating temperature
• 1.7-5.5 V supply voltage range

nRF5340 DK

nRF5340 DK is the official development kit for nRF5340 BLE SoC. The kit breaks out all of the pins of SoC and includes an Arduino Nano footprint to connect any Arduino compatible modules. Programming is done by the on-board SEGGER J-LINK interface, which can also be used to program external nRF modules. The key features of the development kit are,

• nRF5340 SoC
• Support for the following wireless protocols:
  • Bluetooth® Low Energy
  • NFC
  • 802.15.4
  • Thread
  • Zigbee
  • ANT™
  • 2.4 GHz proprietary
• Arduino Rev3 compatibility
• 2.4 GHz and NFC antennas
• SWF RF connector for direct RF measurements
• User-programmable LEDs (4) and buttons (4)
• SEGGER J-Link OB programmer/debugger
• Pins for measuring power consumption
• Drag-and-drop Mass Storage Device (MSD) programming
• 1.7-5.0 V power supply from USB, external Li-Po battery, or CR2032 coin cell battery

Links

1. Nordic Semiconductor
2. nRF5340 DK
3. nRF5340 Product Brief PDF
4. Adafruit 2.2″ TFT Display
5. nRF52840 Dongle
6. Power Profiler Kit II