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Arduino SAMD NINA: pinout, specs and Arduino IDE configuration – 1

Renzo Mischianti
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Arduino SAMD NINA

Introduction

The evolution of Arduino boards passes through the use of the SAMD21 processor.
In particular the low-power Arm® Cortex®-M0 32-bit SAMD21 within the boards of the Arduino MKR family. The WiFi and Bluetooth® connectivity is performed with a module from u-blox, the NINA-W10, a low power chipset operating in the 2.4GHz range. On top of those, secure communication is ensured through the Microchip® ECC508 crypto chip. Besides that, you can find a battery charger, and a directionable RGB LED on-board.

The SAMD21 features 14 ADC input pins with a 12-bit resolution compared to 10-bit on the ATmega328p.

The ATSMAD21 is equipped with an integrated USB controller which can be used as either a USB device or host, so you can control a mouse or keyboard or also save data to a USB flash drive.

A killer feature is that it has a set of 6 configurable serial interfaces which can be transformed into UART, I2C master, I2C slave, SPI master or SPI slave.

Here the board Amazon Arduino MKR WiFi 1010

Specs Arduino SAMD boards specs

Microchip SAMD specs

Arduino SAMD21 core functional units block diagram

The Arduino MKR series use in detail an ATSAMD21G18A in the code you can read witch processor variant the Arduino use, look at the diagram.

SAMD Microcontroller code explained

Radio NINA-W10 Specs

The WiFi/Bluetooth module is controlled via the secondary SPI include a dual-core system with two Harvard Architecture Xtensa LX6 CPUs operating at a maximum 240 MHz internal clock frequency (an esp32).

Security and cryptography

The security is granted by microchip ATECC508A

Pinouts

The boards can have additional features like RGB LED, battery managements, additional ports etc.

Arduino MRK WiFi 1010

MKR WIFI 1010 uses a UBlox WiFi module based on Espressif’s ESP32 chipset. The board makes working with WiFi more simple and lower power compared to it’s predecessor. The board has many features for easily prototyping connected devices including battery power management, a security chip, 32bit Microcontroller (Cortex-M0+) and a USB Connection which can power the board as well. The security chip provides secure connections over WiFi via SHA-256 encryption.

Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 pinouts low resolution

Here the spec and high resolution pinout image.

Arduino IDE configuration

By default the SAMD boards aren’t installed, you must go on
Tools --> Boards ... --> Boards manager
and search “SAMD”.

Arduino SAMD MKR boards manager installation

Now you can select your SAMD board

Arduino SAMD MKR select boards

First skecth

Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 have some builtin led, one “normal” on pin 6.

Here the classic blink sketch.

// the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
void setup() {
  // initialize digital pin LED_BUILTIN (pin 6) as an output.
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
}

// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);   // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);    // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
  delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
}

Thanks

  1. Arduino SAMD NINA: pinout, specs and Arduino IDE configuration
  2. Arduino SAMD NINA: WiFiNINA, firmware update, and RGB led
  3. Arduino SAMD (NANO 33 and MKR): SPI flash memory FAT FS
  4. i2c Arduino SAMD MKR: additional interface SERCOM, network and address scanner
  5. Arduino MKR SAMD: FAT filesystem on external SPI flash memory 
  6. Connecting the EByte E70 to Arduino SAMD (Nano 33, MKR…) devices and a simple sketch example

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