Keil 5.20, nRF52 and ESB

[Steve H]

I've successfully compiled, flashed, and run the SDK11 ESB examples on nRF52 DKs using GCC, and am trying unsuccessfully to get them to work on the Keil 5.20 IDE.

I've seen comments that said ESB on the nRF52 wasn't compatible with the Keil IDE - is that correct, and if so, will it ever be supported?

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi,

The older esb.lib files are only compatible with the nRF51x22. In SDK v11, an open source implementation of nrf_esb (based on the microesb project on our github) was added. This has support for both nRF51x22 and nRF52832, and with all compilers that we support (gcc/iar/keil).

Do you get any error message while compiling or debugging on Keil?

Best regards, Håkon

[Steve H]

Hi Håkon,

I've tried copying the code from the ESB examples in SDK11 to a project within Keil, but it won't compile - the ESB headers in the nRF52 device pack seem to be very different from SDK11.

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi Steve, Are you porting from the .lib of ESB to the open-source "nrf_esb" library? If yes, I would recommend to port step-by-step, and try the examples in SDK 11 first to get to know the new API. Unfortunately, we do not have a porting guide for your specific use-case, but we do have one for micro-esb to nrf_esb: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../

Cheers, Håkon

[Steve H]

Hi Håkon,

Thanks for the advice. I'm an experienced developer but I am new to development for Nordic devices and the Keil compiler. This is a new project so I'm happy to go with whatever is the recommended route for developing ESB communications on Keil.

I was hoping that there would be a working example, but there doesn't seem to be one in the DevicePack example, so I was trying the SDK example instead. Is there a working example for developing ESB under Keil?

Thanks again,

Steve.

[Håkon Alseth]

The examples should compile out-of-the-box, but I suspect that Keil is missing one component at your end. It seems there's an issue with the "updater" part of Keil, so it's not finding this component. Could you try manually downloading this and installing it? developer.nordicsemi.com/.../NordicSemiconductor.nRF_DeviceFamilyPack.8.5.0.pack

It should open as a "keil pack installer" when you run it.

[Steve H]

That didn't make a difference when compiling the SDK11 ESB example. The DevicePack examples do compile OK, sorry I didn't explain that clearly - it's the SDK11 ESB example that won't compile in Keil, but are fine with GCC.

The readme.txt in C:\Keil_v5\ARM\PACK\NordicSemiconductor\nRF_Examples\11.0.0-2.alpha indicates that the example "proprietary_rf\esb\esb_ptx_prx" isn't compatible with the pca10040 nRF52 development board. Is it possible to make it compatible somehow?