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]

If you want to "own" the chip then buy nRF52 DK board. It has JTAG/SWD on board, same for serial port emulation over USB, at the same time you have simple area with nRF52 reference design, good antenna and all the ports available on headers. Believe or not but that's the best way for development, all the hings on DK board do not prevent you from "owning" the chip.

In every case forget about "Arduino" style FW flashing over UART (serial line with FTDI chip emulating it over USB or any similar solution), that's not the way how to work with ARM Cortex-M chips. If you still insist on Sparkfun board instead of Nordic DK then get any SEGGER J-Link board, they will all be compatible with SEGGER and Nordic tools/SW. If you are on budget you will hardly get anything cheaper then J-Link on board of nRF5x DK boards (~$40).

[endnode]

Regardless development platform (MAC, Windows, Linux...) you need SWD/JTAG debugger to flash/debug nRF5x, SEGGER J-Link seems to be proven option, but there are more as I've mentioned. When it comes to compilation chain and IDE for cross-compiling on MAC you can find some hints on Blog zone, e.g. this and this.

[FormerMember]

Thanks a lot, I see. So the thing is not a badget. The thing is that I want to cut dev time to minimum, so instead of interacting with Nordic dev kit, jump to developing directly on a custom pcb I make. I ask about sparkfun board because I can simply take their Eagle design and build a pcb which includes only the actual chip(+passive parts). So basically I am asking - if I put on a custom pcb the recommended circuit for the nrf52, can I flash it (or Spark's pcb) with the JTAG you linked? what pins should I expose for this ?

[endnode]

Still I believe the shortest development cycle is to simulate the HW from dev kits, develop functional FW and then fine-tune final things on final HW later (that also takes advantage of parallel FW and HW development as it is usually done by different people). But you can get there with Spakfun board as well.

To SWD: read particular section in nRF52 Product Specification, it should give you all the answers about flashing/debugging interface and PINs needed (just 2 SWD pins are mandatory, the rest is only if you want to use tracing capabilities for advanced debugging).

[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.