Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev 2 and the Seeed nRF52840 Sense

The Nano 33 BLE family of boards is considered part of the Arduino Pro range, targeted at non-hobbyist applications. We are using it as one of the hardware platforms for our Raven Flight Controller Software.

How to Write your own Flight Controller Software — Part 5

There are now four board configuration options:

1. Nano 33 BLE — A board with 3.3V logic and a 9 axis inertial sensor (LSM9DS1). As the name suggests, it has a 2.4 GHz Bluetooth® 5 Low Energy (BLE) module from u-blox, and an internal antenna. It uses the nRF52840 chip from Nordic Semiconductors, a 32-bit ARM® Cortex®-M4 CPU running at 64 MHz.
2. Nano 33 BLE Rev 2 — The design update includes replacing the LSM9DS1 with a combination of the BMI270 (6-axis IMU) and the BMM150 (3-axis IMU). Additionally, the MPM3610 power supply is being replaced with the MP2322. A VUSB soldering jumper has been added to the top side of the board, and a new test point has been introduced for USB, SWDIO, and SWCLK.
3. Nano 33 BLE SENSE — The SENSE is identical to the Nano 33 BLE but includes additional sensors: a microphone, a gesture, light and colour sensor (APDS9960), as well as temperature, humidity, and air pressure sensors (LPS22HB).
4. Nano 33 BLE SENSE Rev 2 — The Rev 2 is the same as the SENSE but with updated sensors. In particular:

- Replacement of IMU from the LSM9DS1 (9 axis) to a combination of two
  IMUs, the BMI270, 6 axis gyro & accelerometer and the BMM150,
  3 axis magnetometer
- Replacement of temperature and humidity sensor from HTS221 to the HS3003
- Replacement of microphone from MP34DT05 to MP34DT06JTR
- Replacement of power supply MPM3610 to MP2322
- Addition of VUSB soldering jumper on the top side of the board
- New test point for USB, SWDIO and SWCLK.

Figure 1. Arduino Nano 33 BLE (credit: Arduino)

The Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 Sense

In addition to the Arduino range, a number of other manufacturers have released boards based on the nRF52840 processor. One example is the Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense. This…