Nordic nRF boards (microbit)

The Nordic nRF chips are a family of ARM-based System-on-Chip that are designed to be used for low-power and short-range wireless solutions.

The nRF51 series is the first series for short range wireless applications. It is superseded by the nRF52 series. The following machines are based on this chip :

  • microbit BBC micro:bit board with nRF51822 SoC

There are other series such as nRF52, nRF53 and nRF91 which are currently not supported by QEMU.

Supported devices

  • ARM Cortex-M0 (ARMv6-M)
  • Serial ports (UART)
  • Clock controller
  • Timers
  • Random Number Generator (RNG)
  • GPIO controller
  • NVMC
  • SWI

Missing devices

  • Watchdog
  • Real-Time Clock (RTC) controller
  • TWI (i2c)
  • SPI controller
  • Analog to Digital Converter (ADC)
  • Quadrature decoder
  • Radio

Boot options

The Micro:bit machine can be started using the -device option to load a firmware in ihex format. Example:

$ qemu-system-arm -M microbit -device loader,file=test.hex