nrf52dk for learning ARM based development

[krishnanmc3]

Hello all,

I am new to ARM architecture with some prior experience in Arduino based application development and some FPGA experience. I have a few queries:

1. Should I have an overview of the BLE stack or should I understand the different layers in depth to build BLE based projects?
2. How familiar must I be with ARM architecture to develop nrf52 based applications? I already own a nrf52 dk. Since I am new to ARM based development and microcontroller based development in general, can I use the nrf52 dk itself as a training board to learn ARM architecture?

Thanks in advance, Ram

[endnode]

Hi Ram,

1. It's highly recommended to have at least high level understanding about how BLE stack works from bottom to up, what are high-level differences between BT SIG specifications v4.0/4.1/4.2/5.0 etc. There are several nice presentations and whitepapers on the internet, including Nordic tutorials and papers (you can find the links on this site). Without that knowledge you will hit the wall sooner or later because you will use assumptions about how BLE radio works, base your application design on them and then be surprised and disappointed by the reality.
2. If you have knowledge about embedded 8/16 bit systems and ANSI C programming then you can learn small details of 32-bit ARM Cortex-M architecture on the road. Actually nRF52 seems to be very good platform for that (from my experience).

Cheers Jan

[krishnanmc3]

Thank you Jan. An additional question, if I may. Regarding point 2, any documentation/material available online? I have tried looking this up. But, most online materials are based around dev boards from ST Micro or TI.

[endnode]

Ooops, this is though one. I guess there are some generic documents available from ARM directly, probably with some videos and education material as well (but I expect more marketing bs then real technical info). Then material to chips from other vendors who do ARM CortexM chips like TI/STMicro/Atmel/NXP might be good but it's usually very difficult to distinguish what is part of ARM platform and what is custom feature of that particular IC/family by that vendor. I've simply worked with Nordic nRF51/52 Product Specifications because you will learn all the basics there (like 32-bit architecture, memory mapping, AHx bus role etc.) and you can directly work with simple examples from nRF5 SDK which work directly with registers/HAL if you want to see how these work, at the same time you can move any time to higher abstraction layer and use modules/skeletons from Nordic as well.