"Welcome to this article, this author brought everyone Silicon Labs Internet of Things development board, EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko Development Kit.
First, unpacking and hardware introduction:
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For Silicon Labs, this company believes that everyone is not strange, this is a semiconductor design company that is free of wafer, which is more than intensive simulated mixed signals and wide application ICs, such as the C8051 series we are well known and in the development process. The USB transfer UART used in the medium is used, and there are 32-bit microcontroller EFM32 series and other products. Silicon Labs products cover multiple areas such as consumer electronics, industrial electronics, automotive electronics, communication electronics, etc., this issue of development board EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko Development kit is a safe wireless SOC solution applied to ultra low power in the IOT field. Program.
For outsourcing, EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko development kits is still very delicate, green gecko cooperate with Wi-Fi logo and the name of the kit, it is estimated that the name of the tiger is intended to adapt to a variety of environments. Only the appearance is really simple and clear, open the outer packaging, the inside is the protagonist of our evaluation today, EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko Development Kit. Divided into two layers:
The upper layer is mainly placed on board and bottom plates.
The following layers are mainly placed in the specification and the USB cable.
The EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko Development Kit is used by Silicon Labs Wireless SOC EFR32XG22, which is a complete design reference for the IOT field.
The development kit contains 6 parts:
1. BRD4001A Wireless Getting Started Site Motherboard
2. BRD4182A EFR32XG22 2.4 GHz +6 DBM 5X5 mm, QFN40 wireless board
3. BRD4183A EFR32XG22 2.4 GHz +6 DBM 4X4 mm, QFN32 wireless board
4. USB A to MINI USB B cable
5. 10-pin 1.27 mm IDC debugging cable
6. BRD8010A debug adapter board
After three, there is nothing to say, it is some wire and adapter used in the debugging process, which contains a MINI USB USB cable, a board card that transfers the debug interface, and a 1.27 spacing 2 * 5 PIN cable, now a lot of onboard JTAG or SWD interfaces will use this 1.27 interface. Silicon Labs is also very intimate, STK / WSTK Debug Adapter rotation and cable, which makes it easy for us to debug other boards through the suite, more intimate is the motherboard in the suite, this will be in the introduction of the motherboard later Patent.
Simply said that the accessory part of the EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko development kit, then we started the main dishes.
The first is this larger motherboard - BRD4001A wireless entry suite motherboard.
This motherboard contains the Ethernet J-Link Debugger network port and an LCD display, you can use the Mini USB power supply or battery power. J-Link coordinates the accessories such as the transfer plate before we say, you can implement the J-Link debugging function, watching the mark on the board should be the genuine J-Link of Segger, or very convenient and conscience backplane.
Then the interface of the wireless board is used to connect BRD4182A and BRD4183A two wireless core boards.
The connection interface of the main board and the BRD4182A, the BRD4183A wireless core panel are defined as follows:
The board-related functionality is implemented by both interfaces, including providing the device module interface on the motherboard to the wireless board, such as a 128 * 128 LCD display, 8 Mbit Nor Flash. There is also a plate of temperature sensor Si7021. Overall framework, as shown below.
The wireless panel is divided into two cards, which BRD4182A EFR32XG22 2.4 GHz 6 DBM Radio Board and BRD4183A EFR32XG22 2.4 GHz 6 dBM QFN32 Radio Board, the difference is that the main difference is that the main chip has different packages, BRD4182A use The QFN40 encapsulated EFR32XG22 chip, and BRD4183A is an EFR32XG22 chip package using QFN32. Overall, the integration is very high, two boards are all SOC + FLASH + OSC +-onboard antennas, basically, the minimum system of the EFR32XG22 chip.
The core of the EFR32XG22 chip is the 32-Bit ARM® Cortex®-M33 core. The maximum frequency can run to 76.8 MHz, integrated DSP and floating point arithmetic unit, low power mode down to 50.9 μA / MHz, internal integration Programming Flash, 1024KB, and 96KB in-chip, and integrated hardware encryption accelerator, supports AES, ECDH, HMAC, J-PAKE, etc. Encrypted acceleration, hardware's true random number generator, security start, security debugging, and unique ID .
EFR32XG22 chip integrates PA's op amp, compatible with Bluetooth 5.1, Bluetooth 5.0, and Bluetooth network specification, support ZigBee 2.4GHz, compatible with IEEE802.15.4 specification, programmable output power can reach ± 20 dBm, and integrate related protocol stacks.
For the outer part, the EFR32XG22 chip is also rich, with 12bit 1MSPS SAR ADC, analog comparator, 8 channels of DMA, UART, SPI, and up to 20 channels of GPIO.
When we need to debug, the EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko Development Suite provides us with very convenient DBG conditions:
1. Panel J-Link, debug the EFR32 of the onboard interface:
2. By the board J-Link, debug external board:
3. Debug on the onboard EFR32 through an external debugger:
Second, the design resource introduction:
Silicon Labs provides us with related Design Guide, which is designed with Design Guide to greatly avoid the problem that our design is easy to ignore. Since the EFR32 series chip involves the design of the RF part, the engineer who is not enough old road is slightly not paying attention to the ditch, but there is a reference design of the EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko development kit, plus the Design Guide, can greatly improve the design Accuracy, avoid problems.
The chip of the EFR32XG22 is very high, which brings convenience to the line design, but the design of the RF portion is still unable to have official design references and Design Guide, even if there is no more understanding of the entire system. It is still possible to design a hardware circuit correctly, here you have to give Silicon Labs.
The author itself is a hardware engineer, but the design of the RF part is not much involved. It is probably looking at the Design Guide of Silicon Labs, and has more understanding of RF design.
Reference documentation: AN928.2-EFR32-Series2-layout-design-guide.pdf
EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko Development Kit uses the EFR32xg22 series of chips, because there is this chip support, the development kit can support Bluetooth Bluetooth Le, ZigBee, Thread, and proprietary wireless connection multi-protocol wireless connection features, this can meet constant changes The market demand, and supports the on-site upgrade, speeding up production.
At the same time, the chip that supports multi-protocol wireless connection features also has EFR32MG21 Series 2 SoC, EFR32MG12 Series 1 SOC, EFR32MG13 Series 1 SOC, EFR32BG21 Series 2 SOC and EFR32BG21 Series 2 SOC. Detailed support details are shown below.
Supports multi-protocol wireless connection feature, SOC can implement Wi-Fi coexistence, manage Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Thread coexistence, and can also complete mesh network, Bluetooth network, Thread and Zigbee network stars. Item
Compared to traditional wireless chips, only one frequency band protocol and protocol stack, Silicon Labs EFR32XG22 series chip can perform four major features such as programmable protocols, exchange multi-protocols, dynamic multi-protocols, multi-radio protocols.
The programmable multi-protocol support chipset uses the appropriate software stack to make it run any number of wireless protocols. This means programming the chip in production to support low-energy Bluetooth, ZigBee, Thread or proprietary protocols, simplify hardware design, and quickly meet the needs of different markets.
The swap multi-protocol can boot the new firmware image in the case where the networked device has been deployed, so that the device can change the wireless protocol in use. By using smartphone connections, you can switch between low energy Bluetooth, ZigBee, Thread, and other wireless networks, which can greatly improve the experience when setting or debug product. Download (OTA) update feature by adding air, you can also update the device on site and improve the convenience of project projects.
Any multi-protocol solution must solve such a problem: How to use a minute mechanism to share radio to run multiple wireless protocols simultaneously on a single chip. This method can achieve more use, is especially true when using low-energy Bluetooth and other wireless protocols. The simplest use case is as follows: In the retail environment, the Bluetooth beacons are regularly used from the normal running ZigBee, Thread or 1 GHz or less wireless protocols.
If multiple protocols are specifically used, dual radio is required, especially when different protocols use different radio frequencies. If the application and network stack can work across two channels (this two channels may even use a completely different frequency range), is it great? The UK's smart meter is like this. The British government will deploy a double Phy ZigBee communication hub for 3020,000 families and enterprises before 2020, in realization of 2.4 GHz Zigbee devices and Sub-GHz ZigBee devices (using 868 MHz band) Home Regional Network, these devices are kept on the same logic PAN, and the communication hub is routed between different radio frequencies at different radio frequencies.
Here is a Bluetooth and zigbee protocol one-click switch mode operation video:
In this regard, multi-protocol wireless connection is the fidelity of EFR32XG22 series chips, which also makes this series of chips have stronger adaptability, which can deal with more complex multi-network environment and protocols, which are very popular in many scenes. The necessary, such as a smart home environment. Communication between traditional smart home devices enters the server through 2.4G or 5G Wi-Fi network, which not only increases the data delay, but also makes the path of data longer, increasing the risk of data transmission, but If you use the Silicon Labs EFR32XG22 series chip to make communication between smart home devices and server communications physically isolated, improve data security, speed up system response speed.
There are many applicable scenes for multi-protocol wireless connectivity, like smart homes just said, and there are lighting systems, mesh networks and industrial automation.
Third, the software environment:
Let's take a look at the development environment of the software. We will use the SILICON LABS Provided by the Simplicity Studio Development Software IDE for our EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko development kit.
First install the software:
The development environment of the SIMPLITY Studio4 is installed.
We need to add our board in the development environment IDE. Open the down arrow in the upper left corner to Update Software. In the pop-up dialog, there will be information we have uses the board, protocol stack, and related SDK. Here the author chooses the development board we use, you can search according to the model provided above. Let's search for BRD4182A here.
You can see the motherboard of the EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko Development Kit we use in the IDE, select the Dependency-dependent installation of the BRD4182A wireless board to be used. After the installation is complete, we will handle the installation of the relevant protocol stack SDK.
You can see the information we have chosen to support, and then you want to test ZigBee-related content, but you need to fill in the SN code to register, this SN code can be found on the outer package.
The location of the SN code:
When we fill in the SN code, we can install the ZigBee protocol provided by Silicon Labs.
Select all the data package for installation.
The related development environment has been completed. Let's choose a Zigbee Demo project to see.
Silicon Labs provides all routines for us:
Let's choose this Power ON / OFF.
It is good to follow the class according to the class:
The tool will automatically help us generate engineering, engineering environment seems to be open source EclipsE, adjust the tool chain GCC, so you can directly build, then Download to the board.
Fourth, summary
Finally, the author will simply evaluate the experience of the EFR32XG22 Wireless Gecko development kit.
A praise: Although I engaged in hardware development, but the daily work related to RF design involves very little, at best, is to draw a iPex of transposons, direct connection to an external antenna. However, the Design Guide provided by Silicon Labs adds the author's knowledge vulnerability to the RF part, and there are some bottom gas in the work.
Praise 2: It is undoubtedly a board J-Link. When you just get the board, the author does not use the same core device, how to use the Core of M33. This thought will provide a library, but actually use, the entire component is completed by the IDE provided by Simplicity Studio, and the download speed is also very satisfactory. The 4GB related SDK and BSP will be downloaded quickly. It should be a server in China. . The overall organizational structure is also very good, Bluetooth, Zigbee, peripherals, etc. related routines, SPEC documents, function is also clear, and the integration is also very high.
If you want to know this kit, I believe that you can also get started quickly, implement design, is indeed a unpleasant low-power wireless IoT development platform.
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