So is there a way to develop on a mac? Can I use Sparkfun pcb with Nordic?

[FormerMember]

Following a discussion I just saw here Yesterday, people asked about an editor for mac and I could not see there was a clear answer. I was thinking also to go with the nrf51/52 building a custom board. After reading a lot of posts, turns out Keil is not for mac, and I am looking for an editor to use on a mac other then Eclipse.

If you can work with the GCC/ Xcode - how you do that? how would you flash the device ?

I'v seen that, which only state that "it works", but how it works ?

Also, if we use the Sprakfun breakout board that was mentioned here, can we flash it using Nordic firmware and not Arduino ? (with Sparkfun's programmer on the same pins)

Thanks !

[endnode]

Setting up GCC on MAC should be standard, IDE integration is also possible (see blog zone on this forum and search for MAC, Apple or OSX). When it comes to flashing that will be more difficult:

• If you want to stay with Sparkfun proprietary UART bootloader then you need to learn from them how to set it up on MAC (and with IDE you choose, although Make file integration shouldn't be too much difficult).
• If you want to fully "own" nRF52 FW then you need to switch to some SWD (JTAG) flasher like SEGGER J-Link (using Nordic nRF51 or nRF52 DK is pretty convenient for ~$40) or ST-Link or LPCLink or some open source flasher like this one.

[FormerMember]

So why use their board? its only about the Jtag. You know I just went over 10 well known products in the market that are using nrf51/2 , non of them uses the integrated processor for their application. All of them using the same STM32 processors and the nrf for BLE. Could the reason be that this processor is limited/too complicated to handle? It starts to feel unreasonable to base the product application on this chip and become dependable.