development of nRF52 with BLE

[AndreaO]

We are developing a product based on nRF52 with BLE communication.

We have PCA10036, with engineering sample 1, no more compatible with new soft devices.

1. Should I wait for PCA10040? This board should have engineering sample 2. Will this samples will be supported in all new soft device release, or will dead shortly like PCA10036?

2. Should I wait for final production sample of nRF52 in QFN package?

3. Or can I order an nRF51 DK with nRF51422? Latest SDK 11 seems to unify APIs between nRF51 and nRF52. I can develop my BLE application on nRF51 and then easily migrate the code to the final nRF52 target.

Andrea

[RK]

Tough question - depends a bit on what's the most important piece of your development. You have a PCA10036, that is an early engineering board, it has lots of anomalies in the peripherals and you are limited to the S132 V1. So if you need all the peripherals to work, that's a problem, the softdevice differences aren't that great, there's more configurability in the V2, letting you pick how many fast/slow etc connections you have. That's the majority of it however and it's not terribly hard to go back and add that stuff. If that is very important to you right now, then the best way is get an nRF51 and use the V2 S130 release, which is the most similar softdevice.

What features of the nRF52 do you need in your product which the nRF51 doesn't have? That may be far more of an issue for your development than the fairly small incompatibilities in the S132 V1 and V2.

Since you have a PCA10040 in your hands, unless some of the peripheral anomalies are an issue for you, I'd get going with that, and then make the small changes from S132 V1 to S132 V2 when the newer devkit comes out. You can at least get development started on the right processor with the kind of peripherals you're going to have.