Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

RK — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:58:50 GMT

.. 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.

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

RK — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:54:45 GMT

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 ..

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

Petter Myhre — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 11:18:08 GMT

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

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

Daniel Wang — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 21:23:28 GMT

+1 on looking into mBed if you only want something simple, take a look here: developer.mbed.org/.../

Take a look at those Example programs there

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

Bndit — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 18:13:25 GMT

Arrogance of people who can't take their heads out of the code and understand simple human needs. Great, you are smarter then me.

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

endnode — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 18:06:07 GMT

Always glad to learn new bits about SW engineering:)

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

Bndit — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 17:39:28 GMT

Best class embedded applications? I think we are getting a little bit philosophical here, but you seems to not understanding what life is about and why engineers are here. I know its more fun when its hard because you feel smart and so on, but the main goal is to build a product as fast as possible, and if most of them, 99.5%, only need to toggle ports and run simple algorithms, then "understanding SW" is overrated, especially because we only live once, and we want to build products for people and not pushing people to understand how a chip maker was thinking when he made a chip :)

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

endnode — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 17:29:09 GMT

There are people using Arduino IDE for nRF5x, one of the latest Arduino boards have it. There are things like Adafruite boards/IDE and mBed, they will probably be closer to what you are looking for. You can call me (and other people here) a dinosaur but this is how we really write the SW because there is no "shortcut" by nice and easy IDE on today's ARM Cortex-M processors if you want to have best-in-class embedded application, it's as simple as that. Not saying you need to go the same way, maybe other tools will make you happy.

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

Bndit — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 17:24:52 GMT

I'v read these, and it actually seems like a nightmare to me. Not sure why other then Arduino no chip maker can actually make a software that simply let you start coding and hit a button to flash. Why its always so hard. If we have to go through hell to build the exact same things we can build with Arduino and feel less "sophisticated" so I think I am out..

RE: Starting out on a mac with this breakout board

endnode — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 17:18:18 GMT

Hey, please read the blog posts and tutorials, there are several of them related to OSX and MAC (like this and this)