Some NRF52 SDK help please.

[Hein]

Hi there, I have managed to set up my IDE and build environment so that I can build and download the example projects without any trouble, but have then spent the last two days fumbling through the SDK trying to work out when / how to use a library vs. hal vs. driver.

The projects we intend to use the chip for will always use the S132 soft device, and looking at the documentation for that, it indicates which peripherals are blocked / restricted, but doesn't specifically say in which way they are used.

So, for instance, if I use a soft device, am I limited to using APP_TIMERs in my main application ? Or can I somehow still access Timer2/3 etc ?

I guess what I really want to know is . . . If I use the S132 soft device, which part of the SDK is available for me to use in my application ? I assume I cannot just manually configure peripherals by accessing their registers ? (Example: NRF_CLOCK->XXX = XXX) ?

I hope my questions were clear enough, would really appreciate some guidance here.

[Hein]

Just to add, my understanding of the soft device is that it grabs the 'real' interrupts from peripherals and passes events through to the main application, so presumably I cannot use 'real' peripherals if I have a soft-device, and will have to access peripherals through some abstraction layer ?

[Hein]

OK, so for some reason things just 'clicked' this morning and I'm now away happily using multiple peripherals. Basically looking at the examples while reading the softdevice data sheet while simultaneously reading the SOC datasheet has made things reasonably clear. I also found this question: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../ which really helped a lot.

[Petter Myhre]

Great! You can use some peripherals directly, but some are restricted or protected, see this for more information. Should I accept your answer to show that this question is answered?

[Hein]

Sure Petter, I'm pretty happy that I have it all mostly worked out now.