Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense

Overview

The Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense is Adafruit's most sensor-rich Feather board, combining the Nordic nRF52840 Bluetooth 5.0 microcontroller with six factory-mounted environmental and motion sensors — all in the standard Feather form factor. It is designed for wireless sensing applications where collecting multiple data streams simultaneously is required without adding external sensor modules.

The six onboard sensors cover a broad range of measurements: the LSM6DS3TR-C provides 9-DoF motion data (3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope), the LIS3MDL adds a 3-axis magnetometer for compass functionality, the APDS9960 measures proximity, ambient light level, RGB color, and hand gestures, a PDM digital microphone captures audio, the SHT31-D senses relative humidity and temperature, and the BMP280 measures barometric pressure, temperature, and altitude. This combination makes the board ideal for environmental data logging, gesture interfaces, and motion-activated applications.

The nRF52840 core runs at 64MHz with hardware floating-point acceleration and provides 1MB of internal Flash and 256KB of SRAM. Its integrated 2.4GHz BLE radio enables wireless data transmission to smartphones and computers via Bluetooth 5.0. Native USB eliminates the need for a separate USB-to-UART bridge, and the UF2 bootloader enables drag-and-drop firmware updates.

The board follows Adafruit's standard Feather pinout with 21 GPIO, six 12-bit ADC inputs, 12 PWM outputs, and hardware SPI/I2C/UART/I2S on any pins. It carries FCC, IC, and TELEC certifications and supports both CircuitPython and the Arduino IDE via Adafruit's nRF52 board package. Four mounting holes simplify enclosure integration.