Arduino Nicla Vision

Overview

Arduino Nicla Vision is a development board by Arduino based on the STM32H747GAII, a dual core ARM Cortex-M7 + Cortex-M4 MCU, with 2MBytes of Flash memory and 1MB SRAM.

The board features:

  • RGB LED

  • Reset Boot button

  • USB device

  • Murata Type 1DX Bluetooth + WiFi module (CYW4343W based)

  • GC2145 2 Megapixel Camera Sensor

  • SE050C2HQ1 Crypto IC

  • MP34DT06JTR Omnidirectional Microphone

  • VL53L1CBV0FY ToF Sensor

  • LSM6DSOXTR Gyro+Accelerometer Sensor

Arduino Nicla Vision

More information about the board, including the datasheet, pinout and schematics, can be found at the Arduino Nicla Vision website.

More information about STM32H747GAII6 can be found here:

Supported Features

The current Zephyr arduino_nicla_vision/stm32h747xx/m7 board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

PINMUX

on-chip

pinmux

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

FLASH

on-chip

flash memory

RNG

on-chip

True Random number generator

I2C

on-chip

i2c

SPI

on-chip

spi

IPM

on-chip

virtual mailbox based on HSEM

RADIO

Murata 1DX

WiFi and Bluetooth module

And the arduino_nicla_vision/stm32h747xx/m4 has the following support from Zephyr:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

PINMUX

on-chip

pinmux

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

Other hardware features are not yet supported on Zephyr port.

Fetch Binary Blobs

The board Bluetooth/WiFi module requires fetching some binary blob files, to do that run the command:

west blobs fetch hal_infineon

Note

Only Bluetooth functionality is currently supported.

Resources sharing

The dual core nature of STM32H747 SoC requires sharing HW resources between the two cores. This is done in 3 ways:

  • Compilation: Clock configuration is only accessible to M7 core. M4 core only has access to bus clock activation and deactivation.

  • Static pre-compilation assignment: Peripherals such as a UART are assigned in devicetree before compilation. The user must ensure peripherals are not assigned to both cores at the same time.

  • Run time protection: Interrupt-controller and GPIO configurations could be accessed by both cores at run time. Accesses are protected by a hardware semaphore to avoid potential concurrent access issues.

Programming and Debugging

Applications for the arduino_nicla_vision board should be built per core target, using either arduino_nicla_vision/stm32h747xx/m7 or arduino_nicla_vision/stm32h747xx/m4 as the target.

See Building an Application for more information about application builds.

Flashing

This board can be flashed either using dfu-util, or with an external debugging probe, such as a J-Link or Black Magic Probe, connected to the on board MIPI-10 SWD port marked as “JTAG”.

Note

The board ships with a custom Arduino bootloader programmed in the first flash page that can be triggered by double clicking the RST button. This bootloader is USB-DFU compatible and supports programming both the internal and external flash and is the one used by west flash by default.

First, connect the Arduino Nicla Vision board to your host computer using the USB port to prepare it for flashing. Double click the RST button to put the board into the Arduino Bootloader mode. Then build and flash your application.

Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b arduino_nicla_vision/stm32h747xx/m7 samples/hello_world
west flash

Run a serial host program to connect with your board:

$ minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0

You should see the following message on the console:

Hello World! arduino_nicla_vision

Similarly, you can build and flash samples on the M4 target.

Here is an example for the Blinky application on M4 core.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b arduino_nicla_vision/stm32h747xx/m4 samples/basic/blinky
west flash

Debugging

Debugging is supported by using west debug with an external probe such as a J-Link or Black Magic Probe, connected to the on board through the edge eslov pins as “SWD”. For example:

west debug -r jlink