The Nordic Thingy:52™ (nRF6936) is a compact, power-optimized, multi-sensor development kit device designed for collecting environmental data of various types. It is also an easy-to-use development platform, designed to help you build IoT prototypes and demos, without the need to build hardware or write firmware from scratch.
Thingy is built around the nRF52832 Bluetooth® 5 SoC from Nordic Semiconductor. It connects to Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, laptops, tablets, Raspberry Pis and similar devices, and sends data to/from its sensors and actuators to an app and to the cloud.
Thingy can sense movement, orientation, temperature, humidity, air pressure, light, color, and air quality. It can also play sound via its speaker and stream sound to the host from its microphone.
The functionality of Thingy can be configured over-the-air via a Bluetooth API. That makes it possible to create demos and prototypes without actually programming the Nordic Thingy:52 itself, and do all development on the app or cloud solution. As new versions of the firmware are released, Thingy can be updated over-the-air using the provided apps. Advanced users can use Thingy as a development kit by building their own firmware and uploading it onto the board.
Key features of Nordic Thingy:52
- Highly configurable IoT sensor kit
- All sensors and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) parameters are configurable through a BLE interface.
- nRF52832 System on Chip (SoC) solution
- Configurable RGB LED and button
- Cloud connectivity
- Example apps for Android and iOS, as well as a web application that uses Web Bluetooth API.
- Environmental sensors
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Air pressure
- Air quality (CO2 and TVOC)
- Color and light intensity
- nine-axis motion sensing
- Tap detection
- Orientation
- Step counter
- Quaternions
- Euler angles
- Rotation matrix
- Gravity vector
- Compass heading
- Raw accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass data
- Sound
- Speaker for playing prestored samples, tones, or sound streamed over BLE (8 bit 8 kHz LoFi)
- Microphone streaming (ADPCM compressed 16 bit 16 kHz)
- Secure over-the-air device firmware upgrade (OTA DFU)
- Low power consumption
- Near field communication (NFC) support
- All software source code available and documented
