EFR32BG13 2.4 GHz 10 dBm (SLWRB4104A)

Overview

The EFR32BG13 Blue Gecko Bluetooth® Low Energy Radio Board is one of the two radio boards delivered with SLWSTK6020B Bluetooth SoC Starter Kit. It contains a Wireless System-On-Chip from the EFR32BG13 family built on an ARM Cortex®-M4F processor with excellent low power capabilities.

SLWRB4104A Blue Gecko Bluetooth® Low Energy Radio Board

SLWRB4104A (image courtesy of Silicon Labs)

The BRD4104A a.k.a. SLWRB4104A radio board plugs into the Wireless Starter Kit Mainboard BRD4001A and is supported as one of Radio Boards.

Hardware

  • EFR32BG13P632F512GM48 Blue Gecko SoC

  • CPU core: ARM Cortex®-M4 with FPU

  • Flash memory: 512 kB

  • RAM: 64 kB

  • Transmit power: up to +10 dBm

  • Operation frequency: 2.4 GHz

  • 8Mbit SPI NOR Flash

  • Crystals for LFXO (32.768 kHz) and HFXO (38.4 MHz).

For more information about the EFR32BG13 SoC and BRD4104A board, refer to these documents:

Supported Features

The board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

MPU

on-chip

memory protection unit

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

SYSTICK

on-chip

systick

COUNTER

on-chip

rtcc

FLASH

on-chip

flash memory

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

SPI(M)

on-chip

spi port-polling

WATCHDOG

on-chip

watchdog

The default configuration can be found in boards/silabs/radio_boards/slwrb4104a/slwrb4104a_defconfig

Connections and IOs

In the following table, the column Pin contains Pin names. For example, PA2 means Pin number 2 on PORTA, as used in the board’s datasheets and manuals.

Pin

Function

Usage

PF4

GPIO

LED0

PF5

GPIO

LED1

PF6

GPIO

Push Button PB0

PF7

GPIO

Push Button PB1

PA5

GPIO

Board Controller Enable VCOM_ENABLE

PA0

USART0_TX

UART Console VCOM_TX US0_TX #0

PA1

USART0_RX

UART Console VCOM_RX US0_RX #0

PC6

SPI_MOSI

Flash MOSI US1_TX #11

PC7

SPI_MISO

Flash MISO US1_RX #11

PC8

SPI_SCLK

Flash SCLK US1_CLK #11

PA4

SPI_CS

Flash Chip Select (GPIO)

System Clock

The EFR32BG13P SoC is configured to use the 38.4 MHz external oscillator on the board.

Serial Port

The EFR32BG13P SoC has three USARTs and one Low Energy UARTs (LEUART). USART0 is connected to the board controller and is used for the console.

Programming and Debugging

Flashing

Connect the BRD4001A board with a mounted BRD4104A radio module to your host computer using the USB port.

Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b slwrb4104a samples/hello_world
west flash

Open a serial terminal (minicom, putty, etc.) with the following settings:

  • Speed: 115200

  • Data: 8 bits

  • Parity: None

  • Stop bits: 1

Reset the board and you should see the following message in the terminal:

Hello World! slwrb4161a