Blinking LED's on nrf51DK on pressing a button

[soumil]

Hi,

I recently bought the nrf 51 development kit. Before implementing a BLE application on the board I wanted to start with a simple application of blinking a LED by pressing a button on the board. I am finding it difficult to understand how should I use the BSP and GPIO library. And secondly how should one understand the complete SDK. Is the documentation the only source of understanding.

Since I am just starting with the development kit, any details on how one should proceed and gain expertise in developing applications on nrf51-DK would be appreciated

[MartinBL]

Hi

As RK says in his comment there are plenty of examples in the SDK and most of them use the bsp and gpio libraries. I do agree with you though, that the learning curve is steep for a beginner. I would recommend that you have a look at the tutorial section here on devzone. It has tutorials covering how to set up your kits and IDEs as well as more advanced guides on how to use Bluetooth and peripherals. You might also benefit from playing around with the peripheral examples to get a feel for of the SDK, drivers, and the nRF51 itself before you move on to the more advance Bluetooth stuff.

Since you mention bsp, note that there is a bsp example in the SDK located at "your_sdk_folder\examples\peripheral\bsp" (short documentation here). We also have even more example code on github.com/nordicsemiconductor. These examples also vary in complexity, but you will e.g. find examples covering Android and iPhone apps in addition to the usual Bluetooth and ANT.

You should also remember to browse the blog section. It is quite random, but there are a lot of gold in there.

And finally you will find a lot of questions here on devzone asked by beginners.

[soumil]

Thanks for the response. Can we also read Buttons as general GPIO Pins and without using BSP library toggle the LED on the press of button either using interrupts or without it. Any example related to that especially for SDK 11 would be appreciated. I am finding a lot of examples for SDK 8, 9 and I suppose most of them require changes in the code in order to run in the SDK 10 or 11.

[MartinBL]

Yes, you can. You can e.g. use the GPIOTE library found in the SDK or you can configure the pins directly in the GPIOTE registers. What SDK 8 and 9 examples are you referring to?