FAQ

A single-board development kit equipped with Sony chipsets CXD5602 & CXD5247 microcomputer for IoT application. It features Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), high resolution audio playback and recording, and six low power consumption application processor cores.

By combining different communication modules and/or sensor modules, you can create IoT system prototypes. As the board contains a low power consumption high performance capable chipset, you can prototype high performance IoT system for mobile applications.

Please use the micro USB port on the main board to supply 5V power into Spresense. Please refer to Spresense Hardware for more details.

Arduino IDE, Visual Studio Code and a development environment in the console. Please refer to Spresense Software for more information.

C ++ language and C language are supported.

NuttX Real-Time Operating System is adopted. If you are using the Arduino IDE for development, you do not need to be aware of the underlying OS.

It is not possible to run Linux. NuttX has features familiar to Linux users.

Connectivity options are not present by default. By using the Spresense Add-on board or Arduino shield, you can add connectivity capabilities. Please check the Extension Options section on Spresense Developer World website for information and where to buy.

Spresense main board comes with a GNSS sensor and support for 8 microphone inputs making it possible to create an acoustic sensor. With the use of Spresense Add-on board or Arduino shield, other sensors can be connected.

A dedicated camera module is available.

Please check the Spresense distributors webpage.

There are no plans for such kits from Sony. Our distributors may produce such kits. You can find their contact details from Spresense distributors webpage.

Please check for the following:

Please check for the following:

Please check for the following:

If you see the message "Welcome to nash (build xxxxxxx) updater#" on the serial console with 115200 baud rate, it means the boot loader is missing.. Please re-install the boot loader as described in the Install Bootloader for Arduino IDE or Flashing bootloader for Spresense SDK.

If you see the message "D>" on the serial console with 115200 baud rate or cannot upload your sketch, it means some files in the flash memory may be corrupted unexpectedly. Please download the recovery tool from Recovery tool download page. You can use this tool to restore the board to the factory reset state. See the README in the downloaded ZIP file for instructions to use.

All data in flash memory will be erased. After running the recovery tool, please install boot loader again as described in section Install Bootloader for Arduino IDE or Flashing bootloader for Spresense SDK.

Please check for the following:

Please check for the following:

Please check for the following:

Please check for the following:

Spresense main board has a positioning function and an antenna for capturing GPS satellites. You can easily make prototype GPS tracker using the on board GNSS. In addition, the pin socket is equipped with I2S, UART, SPI, I2C, AIN to add audio related LSI, communication module and sensor module, so we can prototype the IoT system relatively easily with a small size.

The IO voltage of the digital pin is 1.8V. The voltage range on the analog inputs is 0-0.7V.

The IO voltage of the digital pin is selectable, 3.3V or 5V. The analog input pin is 0-5V.

The board supports micro USB (2.0) micro B connector.

The reset button is shown in this image.

The main board has a GPS antenna installed, so it is not necessary to attach a separate antenna.

If you want to enjoy the audio function easily, please consider purchasing Spresense extension board which provides an analogue audio interface.

There are no plans to sell this.

Without any other connected parts, the power consumption when executing the Arduino GNSS sample code is approximately 20 mA at 5V which is 100mW.

Spresense extension board only works with Spresense main board. It is a breakout board making it easy to use the audio function, SD card and 5V/3.3V IO.

It is enough to power one of the boards, main board or extension board to be able to use them both together.

It is possible to use 3.3V or 5V on the JP1 pin socket. The analog input pin is fixed at 5V. Please refer to Extension board for more information.

You can connect a wide range of analog and digital microphones. For types and the connection method of the microphone, please refer to How to use microphones.

Arduino shields with a physical protrusion at the location shown in the picture will interfere with the main board. Please use shields that do not have this protrusion.

Please refer to Differences between Spresense and Arduino Uno.

Maximum output is about 6mA and the sink current is about 6mA.

Can use the power supplied type active speaker via the headphone connector.

The Mass Storage Class (MSC) is supported. For example, you can access SD card and eMMC on the add-on board from the PC. It is necessary to specify explicitly which USB configuration to use when the option is presented on the PC. It is not possible to access Spresense program if you use that storage on PC and MSC. For more information please refer to the SDHCI Library.

The power consumption when playing an MP3 file from the SD card is approximately 60 mA at 5V which is 300mW. The example application used for this test is the audio player Arduino sketch app.

LTE-M is a LPWAN (Low Power, Wide Area Network) wireless communication technology for IoT. This communication method is, with its low power use and low communication charges, expected to be deployed for IoT.

By using the LTE extension board, you can create applications that upload data to a server using the high-quality LTE communication network provided by a telecommunication carrier. Unlike when using wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the device can easily perform wireless transmissions without you having to prepare a receiver device by yourself.

The standard communication distance is 10 to 50 km.

The transmission rate is 375 kbps upstream and 300 kbps downstream in best-effort.

The following conditions are recommended for using the extension board:

Please check the list of confirmed SIMs:

This depends on the telecommunication carrier, so please contact your operator.

After purchasing a SIM card, it needs to be registered with a telecommunication carrier. Please register it at the site of the service provider with which you have a contract. If you still cannot communicate, please contact your provider.

Yes, you can develop applications in both the Arduino and SDK environments. Please refer to the LTE tutorials for more details.

A sample application is provided.
You can check the status of your connection after setting the APN, username and password of the service provider you are using.

A sample application is provided.
You can check that communication with a server is possible after setting the APN, username and password of the service provider you are using.

Yes, you can. The SDK environment supports the BSD socket API, which is available for Linux and other platforms.

In the Arduino environment, support can be enabled by adding the stand-alone ArduinoMqttClient library in the IDE.
See the Arduino LTE example, LTE → LteGnssTracker.

The SDK environment supports the MQTT library (Eclipse Paho MQTT C/C++ client for Embedded platforms).
Please see the SDK source code example in the spresense/sdk/examples/lte_mqtt folder.

It is possible to connect to various cloud services. As an example, sample code that connects to AWS services is provided.

There are several factors that may cause unstable communication.

You can check the reception status by using the sample application for connection check.

If the main board is powered only by the PC, a communication error may occur due to insufficient current capacity. Using a USB power supply capable of supplying a current of 1A or more may improve the problem. If you are using the USB connector on the main board as a serial console, please use the USB connector on the LTE extension board for the power supply.

If LTE communication cannot be started, please check the following

If the TLS secure communication function does not work correctly, the following factors may be considered.

If the LTE firmware version is RK_03_00_00_00_00_04121_001, the SMS function may not work correctly. (Please refer to here )
Please update firmware to refer to the Updater Tool on the download site.

If the camera image is acquired while LTE data is being transmitted, noise may appear on the camera image. The noise level can be decreased by shifting the timing of LTE data transmission and camera image acquisition so that they are not simultaneous.

Check the connection between the main board and the LTE extension board.

Communication with a cloud server is usually done using HTTP/HTTPS or MQTT when sending data. These communication protocols add extra information to the data sent, both to and from servers. In other words, this additional information will be added to the data even if it is only a few bytes. The amount of data added varies greatly depending on the library and communication method.

It is an open source program development environment provided by Arduino. Please refer to Download the Arduino IDE for more information.

Please refer to Spresense Arduino Library Getting Started Guide for more information.

Please refer to Spresense Software for more information.

Multi-core programming functionality is available in Arduino IDE. Please refer to Spresense Arduino multi-core environment.

Interrupts are supported for digital pins and a timer. Please refer to Spresense Arduino Sketch App Development and note that Arduino language interrupts function behave slightly differently on Spresense and Arduino Uno.

Please take a look at Spresense GNSS sample sketch for more details.

You can test the application described in Audio Library and modify it for your needs.

The Spresense SDK is a development kit that can directly access the Spresense hardware resources. With utilizing multi-core programming, disabling the unused hardware resources and power saving mode, memory saving and power saving design become possible.

Please refer to Spresense SDK Getting Started Guide (CLI).

Please refer to Spresense SDK Overview.

It is a low power multi-GNSS function where the receiver locks on to multiple GPS and GLONASS positioning satellites at the same time. The positioning accuracy is high compared to a GPS-only receiver due to synchronization and locking to a larger number of satellites.

There is an API for this in the Spresense Arduino Library and Spresense SDK. Please refer to Spresense Software for more information.

It is possible to retrieve NMEA output. Please refer to File →Examples for SPRESENSE → GNSS → gnss_tracker for more details.

WAV and MP3 formats are supported.

You can specify 44.1kHz/24 bits, 48 kHz/24 bits, 96kHz/24 bits, 192kHz/24 bits.

Please look at File →Examples for SPRESENSE →Audio →application → recorder to see how high resolution audio recording can be done.

There is no plan to offer noise cancellation and beam forming software.

Please refer to ASMP Framework.

Please refer to Spresense ASMP programming sample.

Please use a USB battery pack that has a low minimum requirement on the input current such as "CP-V5B","CP-V10B","CP-VC10" from Sony. The reason is some batteries may shutdown the power supply because of the low power consumption of Spresense board.

The use of Lipo battery is not recommended.

Battery charging function is not supported.

This is a compact functional board that can be mounted on the Spresense main board pin socket to expand Spresense capabilities.

Please check the Extension Options section on Spresense Developer World website for information and links to purchase.

The source code is available in public. Please refer to Repository overview for the details.

Please look at the LICENCE files in the respective Spresense GitHub repositories.

Please look at the CONTRIBUTING files in the respective Spresense GitHub repositories.

The circuit diagrams are available to the public at Hardware design materials.

It is available under the CC BY-SA license stipulated in Creative Commons License.

Small volume sales through distributors are not supported. If you are interested in large commercial applications, please use the Contact inquiry form.

They are available at Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation website.