Silicon Labs xG24 Explorer Kit board
Silicon Labs is a reference in Bluetooth connectivity. Recently, Silicon Lab has ported its official Gecko-SDK, or GSDK, to the Arduino SDK. Press releases focused on Silicon Labs and Arduino Partner to Democratize Matter (Silicon Labs) and Aduino and Silicon Labs team up to make the Matter protocol accessible to all (Arduino).
The Silicon Labs xG24 Explorer board offers an interesting option for Bluetooth and Matter in a compact board. |
Hardware
The hardware exposes 20 pins, 16 of which are replicated on the MikroBUS. They include the standard SPI, I²C and UART ports.
The EFR32MG24 SoC is a 78 MHz Cortex-M33 with FPU, and features 1.5 MB of Flash and 256 kB of RAM. The 2.4 GHz radio supports Matter, OpenThread, Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy and Mesh, proprietary and multi-protocol. The board also includes a JST SH connector, a Segger programmer-debugger, two user buttons and two user LEDs, plus a reset button. The USB connector is Type-C. The Qwiik connector is the Sparkfun name for a 4-way JST SH with a 1mm pitch. It is compatible with the Adafruit Stemma QT. It is also compatible with the Seeed Grove System, albeit only for I²C devices operating at 3.3V and with an adapter and Grove plugs have a 2mm pitch. |
Software
Silicon Labs offers two variants for each board, one with pre-compiled SDK, perfect for speed, another without, better for debugging.
Apart from the standards libraries part of the Arduino SDK, Silicon Labs includes two options for Bluetooth, one with the official SDK, named Gecko-SDK and another with an optional library, ezBLE. Finally, Silicon Labs provides one library for Matter. |
Pins Map
Conclusion
I haven't tried Matter yet, as devices are still in limited supply. However, the press releases suggest more Matter-capable products are coming.
At USD10, the Silicon Labs xG24 Explorer board brings great value, with powerful MCU, large memory and built-in Segger debugger. |
Pros
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Cons
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Wrap-Up
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