nRF24LE1 Starter Kit Allows Quick Prototyping with the nRF24LE1 Wireless Chip

The nRF24LE1 Starter Kit is a breadboard-friendly development tool that allows quick prototyping of the nRF24LE1 wireless chip developed by Andriy Malyshenko (Sonocotta). It is trying to close the gap and provide a more user-friendly way to play with the nRF24LE1, since modules available on the market have inconvenient format while tooling is quite poor.

What is nRF24LE1?

Nordic Semiconductor's nRF24LE1 is an 8-bit 8051-compatible microcontroller. It is a unique solution offering a complete ultra-low-power (ULP) wireless system-on-chip (SoC), which integrates the nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz transceiver core, an enhanced 8051 microcontroller, 16 kbytes on-chip flash memory, 1 kbyte on-chip data flash memory, 512 bytes high-endurance data flash memory and 1 kbytes on SRAM plus 256 bytes of IRAM. nRF24LE1 has a wide range of analog and digital peripherals such as SPI master/slave, 2-wire master/slave, UART, 2-channel PWM, and programmable resolution ADC of 6, 8, 10, or 12-bits. Check out the Datasheet of nRF24LE1 for more details!

"You can think of it as Arduino with nRF24L01 in a bundle," Malyshenko notes.

nRF24LE1 Starter Kit features

As mentioned earlier in the article, nRF24LE1 Starter Kit is a breadboard-friendly development tool and it exposed all GPIO ports on the breadboard with 2 power rails powered from a built-in 3.3 voltage stabilizer. The nRF24LE1 Starter Kit has an on-board Atmega328P MCU that serves as programmer role and on-board CH340 USB-Serial bridge allowing direct programming via a built-in USB port.That's user-friendly, especially for the beginner.

Furthermore, the starter kit is designed with ESD and overcurrent protection so that the board is safe to be used. Personally, I think that the weak LED indicators for every port are a very unique feature that helps in the troubleshooting process.

Open source community

nRF24LE1 Starter Kit has great support from the community with the community delivered SDK, programmer code, and code samples in the project repo tested and ready to run. All the information can be found on GitHub repo as it is open source and open hardware.

The nRF24LE1 Starter Kit product is currently available on Tindie for $25.