Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

[Bndit]

Thanks to the answers and support here, I think we are going to use the nrf52832 ( we migrate from another company after having really hard times). I am struggling to find out what IDE and programmer you can use on a mac - that simply works without hassle.

1. If we use this breakout board, can we program it on a mac using Nordic environement ? if so which ? they show the Arduino.

2. When we develop our custom pcb with the chip, what are the options to program it ? (personally and in mass production) ? should we add onboard chips to enable usb programming ?

3. I could see that Xcode can be used, but there is no comprehensive tutorial from start to end and some people having problems setting it up. Is it a stable solution ?

Thank you , and sorry for being a little bit pessimistic before .

[Petter Myhre]

1. For OS X we support GCC, see this and this. You can also look into Segger Embedded Studio and mBed.
2. See this on how to do in-system programming on custom nRF5x devices, for socket programming see this and this.
3. I don't know. Sorry.

[RK]

3. I don't think Xcode is an answer. Perhaps 5-10 years ago you could have shimmed Xcode's front end but not now, it's moved away from being an extensible platform and is really pretty closed and proprietary and it's not good for embedded programming .. at all. It's good for writing macOS, iOS and watchOS apps in ObjC, ObjC++ and Swift and it's really not for much else.

I started embedded programming trying to use everything i was comfortable with, ignoring all the libraries and programming from the registers up. I learned a lot, I wasted a lot of time. Pick an platform designed for embedded, use that, you just saved yourself 50% time and 200% frustration. I don't much like mbed (mostly due to their poor response to an OSX driver issue a few years ago), I do like SES, I would take gcc over Eclipse. The next project I do I'll make more use of Nordic's libraries because even if I can ..

[RK]

.. write something custom myself, it takes a shed load longer.

So on MacOSX (which is what I use) I'd recommend SES or Crossworks ($150 for life for non-commercial) or just use GCC and get up the learning curve of OpenOCD for debugging.

I've done a lot more embedded programming since I started a few years ago with Nordic and found in the end it's easier to swim downstream. I'm currently working on some Atmel code and even though I don't really love their huge development library, I get how it works, and there's a lot of code I don't need to write.