Azure Sphere Secure IOT - A closer look

10 Nov 2018

The magnifying glass and even a microscope came out today as I took a closer look at the board. I like how the headers have a bit of spacing between them, lets see if that's sufficient to allow for connectors. I'm a big fan of the mounting holes / standoffs even if they did get in the way of the microscope.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/hardware/mt3620-user-guide

{gallery} Azure Sphere Close Up
Front of the board with the headers, main SOC, antenna, status LEDs and buttons.
Back of the board, power, battery holder, RTC and FTDI chip
Main SOC the MT3620, Microsoft ARM and MediaTek
FTDI FT4232H USB 2.0 to UART and JTAG, SPI, I2C (emulated)
Power and RTC
Is this the RTC chip?
Scope grounding point just next to the power socket (there's lots of test points on the board)
Two programmable buttons, 4 programmable RGB LEDs, and 3 jumpers.
Both the main and aux antenna have a monitoring socket and a connector for an external antenna, there looks to be a zero ohm resistor which would need to be resoldered to connected that.

{gallery} Azure Sphere Close Up

Front of the board with the headers, main SOC, antenna, status LEDs and buttons.

Back of the board, power, battery holder, RTC and FTDI chip

Main SOC the MT3620, Microsoft ARM and MediaTek

FTDI FT4232H USB 2.0 to UART and JTAG, SPI, I2C (emulated)

Power and RTC

Is this the RTC chip?

Scope grounding point just next to the power socket (there's lots of test points on the board)

Two programmable buttons, 4 programmable RGB LEDs, and 3 jumpers.

Both the main and aux antenna have a monitoring socket and a connector for an external antenna, there looks to be a zero ohm resistor which would need to be resoldered to connected that.

Top Comments

Workshopshed over 6 years ago +1

From a twitter discussion it looks like I've picked the wrong chip when trying to identify the RTC. The "74LCX126" is a "Low Voltage Quad Buffer with 5V tolerant Inputs and Outputs" and that comes in the…

Workshopshed over 6 years ago

The thought about the antenna was correct but it's not a zero ohm resistor that needs resoldering, it's a capacitor.
From: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/hardware/mt3620-user-guide#wi-fi-antennas
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Workshopshed over 6 years ago

From a twitter discussion it looks like I've picked the wrong chip when trying to identify the RTC. The "74LCX126" is a "Low Voltage Quad Buffer with 5V tolerant Inputs and Outputs" and that comes in the DQFN package that was the one I'd picked.

Some further reading of the data sheet shows that the RTC is part of the main SOC so actually we'd not expect an external chip for that one.
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