nrf connect bare metal and blinky

RE: nrf connect bare metal and blinky

Benjamin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 06:44:39 GMT

Hi,
That great! For your question, the hardware is indeed the same. In regular Zephyr, the devicetree tells the OS which drivers to build, which peripherals to manage, and how to configure them. In NCS Bare Metal you manage the hardware yourself to a much larger degree. Instead of using Zephyr’s drivers, those peripheral nodes serve no purpose. Only the memory layout and a few clock and timer nodes remain.

It’s also important to note that NCS Bare Metal isn’t pure vanilla bare metal. It’s still part of the NCS family, so it reuses some parts of Zephyr.

Benjamin

RE: nrf connect bare metal and blinky

Sietse — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:04:31 GMT

Thanks, that works.

And you can consider my question answered, but I am actually curious as to why the regular devicetree (so not bm_xxx) isn't used. The hardware did not change when going to bare metal, or am I missing something?

RE: nrf connect bare metal and blinky

Benjamin — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:10:38 GMT

Hi Sietse,

It looks like you’re building the blinky sample from Zephyr. That sample needs the Zephyr kernel and its GPIO driver, which NCS Bare Metal doesn’t include.

Instead, use the following supported sample: v2.0.1/nrf-bm/samples/peripherals/leds.
Best regards,
Benjamin