Aggregating Data and Sensor Programming With The Arduino Nano 33BLE Sense Board

Dr. Don Wilcher - Watch Now - EOC 2024 - Duration: 39:36

Dr. Don Wilcher

Abstract Test Your Knowledge Questions & Comments (2)

Aggregating data from industrial or environmental systems can require costly data logging or acquisition devices. With micro-miniaturization or MEMs technologies, sensors can be populated on small form factor Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). Included on these PCBs are System on Chip (SoC) microcontrollers. Combining sensors and SoC microcontrollers, PCBs can provide an approach to aggregating data from industrial and environmental systems.

This online conference talk will present an approach to obtaining data from industrial and environmental systems using an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board, Communication Terminal software, and sensor programming techniques.
Topics to be presented for this online talk are listed next.

Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Overview
Accessing On-board Sensors

temperature
relative humidity
microphone
gesture

Logging sensor data with Communication Terminal Software

Tera Term
PuTTY

Lab: Light Sensor OLED Demonstrator (Bricolage)

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Why does the speaker recommend using I2C for accessing the Nano 33 BLE Sense onboard sensors and adding peripherals like an OLED?

A Because the onboard sensors and added peripherals share a common SDA/SCL bus (I2C), allowing multiple devices to be addressed on the same two lines.

B Because each onboard sensor has its own dedicated analog pin on the Nano 33 BLE Sense, so I2C simply mirrors those analog readings.

C Because Bluetooth Low Energy handles wired sensor communications and I2C is only a backup option.

D Because the board uses SPI for most sensors, and I2C is used only for programming the flash.

E Because UART serial ports are the primary method for connecting multiple I2C sensors to the board.

What is the main reason Dr. Don Wilcher says the Nano 33 BLE Sense board is suitable for on-device analysis and TinyML?

A It uses an nRF52840 Cortex‑M4F SoC with floating-point capability, runs at 64 MHz, and provides 1 MB flash and 256 KB RAM suitable for embedded ML models.

B It is based on a tiny 8‑bit AVR MCU which is ideal because it consumes no power when running ML workloads.

C Because the board includes a dedicated GPU for deep learning inference on large neural networks.

D Because it only runs interpreted Python code, which is the preferred TinyML runtime according to the speaker.

E Because the presence of a magnetometer alone is what enables TinyML on the board.

How does the speaker recommend collecting and saving sensor data from the Nano 33 BLE Sense without using an SD card?

A Run the board's serial output into a terminal program (PuTTY or Tera Term) and log the serial data to a CSV/text file in real time.

B Use the Arduino Serial Plotter because it automatically saves plotted data into CSV files for later analysis.

C Write data directly to the microcontroller's internal flash using the Arduino IDE upload dialog.

D Stream the sensor data only over BLE to a cloud server — no local logging is possible or recommended.

E Enable FTP on the Nano 33 BLE Sense and transfer live sensor logs to a remote FTP server.

In the Light Sensor OLED demonstrator, what wiring/reading approach did the speaker use to get a readable analog value from the photoresistor?

A Place the photoresistor in a voltage divider, take the midpoint voltage into the A0 analog input, and read that changing voltage as light varies.

B Connect the photoresistor directly between A0 and ground so the analog pin measures resistance directly.

C Read the photoresistor over I2C since it's a digital light sensor and the board's I2C bus is required.

D Use a digital input with a pull-up and treat the photoresistor as a binary light/no-light switch.

E Install a dedicated light-sensor Arduino library and the board will automatically map any analog pin to lux without extra wiring.

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mrdon219@gmail.comSpeaker

Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Hi DaveK, thanks for the kind comments. The pull resistors for the I2C signals are on the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense pcb. Here is a link to obtain the electronic circuits schematic diagram for the microcontroller platform. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://docs.arduino.cc/resources/schematics/ABX00071-schematics.pdf

DaveK

Score: 0 | 2 years ago | no reply

Nice presentation Don. I noticed there were no pull-up resistors on the i2c signals in your schematic. Are they on the board or on the display board or internal to the processor?

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