Bootloader needed for programming a custom nRF52 board?

[bvuong87]

Hi Devzone,

We are currently awaiting arrival of our custom board, based on the nrf52 chipset, and I've been tasked with determining any potential gotchas with programming it. Our plan is to use our nrf52 dev kit as the programmer, using the SWD pins on the debug out header to connect to the SWDIO/SWDCLK pins of our custom board.

A few questions, I was unable to answers for:

• When programming a brand new NRF52, are there any special steps we'll need to take before programming the softdevice and our application?
• More specifically, will we need to program our fresh chips with a bootloader before the nrf52 will be ready to accept our custom application/softdevice combination?
• Also, are there any other potential pitfalls, or "gotchas" to be on the lookout for while using this method? We're using Keil and nrfgostudio as our tools
• Finally, does using the "erase all" button in the nrfgostudio tool actually erase all memory locations? And if so is this essentially the same state as a fresh from factory chip?

Thanks!

[RK]

No - no special steps

No you don't need to put a bootloader on the thing at all if you don't need one, softdevice, app and bootloader are all separate pieces of code you can mix and match as you please.

Not really - you're putting code on a chip, this is just the same as putting code on the chip in the devkit, same chip, works the same way.

No idea - but you'd expect an erase all button to erase all so it probably does.

[bvuong87]

RK - thanks (as always) for your insight!

Looking forward to programming our custom boards armed with this info