Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

monpetit — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 01:19:35 GMT

Mark, Qt Creator is just an alternative to Eclipse. Unless you hate the latter, I think it's a much better choice.

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Martijn — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 20:42:42 GMT

Yes, when you start a new project you can choose some from some basic examples to start from.

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Mark — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 20:25:53 GMT

Martijn, I looked at VisualGDB and really liked it! It is not free but pretty cheap. It has detailed tutorials too. Does it also have some basic examples to start working with nrf51 and nrf52?

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Mark — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 19:34:51 GMT

Awneil, Free is more important to me at the moment

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Mark — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 19:34:14 GMT

Monpetit, I can see Qt is a good IDE to develop GUI applications, but I'm not sure if it's popular enough for developing code for Nordic devices

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

awneil — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 22:51:57 GMT

So which is the more important - "best" or "free"?

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Martijn — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 20:30:36 GMT

We use visual studio community ( something Microsoft did do right ;) ). We use external batch files to compile our applications. And using a simple custom toolbar, configured in visual studio, we can get all our information in visual studio. The best free IDE in my experience.

Recently we started using VisualGDB extension(not free, but cheap) for visual studio. His is an embedded solution for Visual Studio. This works great, and has support for nrf51 and nrf52.

There are some great extensions like svn integration etc...

Unfortunately no debugging without VisualGDB

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Mark — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 19:40:45 GMT

Keil is not a free IDE. It can be used freely with some limitations, but it's not free.

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

awneil — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 14:35:20 GMT

The answer would have to be Keil, then. That's the one that Nordic use for all their examples

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Mark — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 21:50:10 GMT

By "Best" I mean easy to setup for programming Nordic NRF52-DK, and a popular IDE so finding answers to my future problems would be easy.

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

awneil — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 16:39:01 GMT

"Best" is meaningless without criteria by which to judge it.

So what are the key features that you are looking for in an IDE?

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

monpetit — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 04:57:15 GMT

You can use Qt Creator with the bare metal plugin too. But that's also a tough way.

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

RK — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 01:43:34 GMT

Eclipse is ok really - it wasn't really designed for embedded development but if you use the right plugins (the arm one from livius which probably got even better by now) it's usable, I just never learned to love it.

My biggest problem with it I think was that it uses (pretty much has to use) gdbserver to connect to the debugger and it's amazing it works at all, even more amazing it works as well as it does, but it's nowhere near the kind of performance and stability of having a native local DLL (or equivalent on whatever architecture you're on) to connect to the Segger directly. In the end I spent just a little too much time resetting things randomly before another run.

Eclipse does have the advantage that the Nordic guys use it and post help guides for it, with Crossworks you are somewhat on your own.

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

Mark — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 01:38:19 GMT

Yeah, I tried to use Eclipse couple years ago and didn't like its user interface. Thanks for your suggestion, I'll look into it.

RE: Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

RK — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 01:32:01 GMT

Probably - if you want absolutely free Eclipse is about the only option. I moved away from it because it was just a little too painful and bought the non-commercial license for CrossWorks, which is 'reasonably priced'. They also have a 'free if below a certain code size' option if you want to try it out, but you will blow that option sooner or later.