New to NRF51422

[D_Hercules]

I am developing a product where I need to read a signal from an SPI ADC and send remotely to a receiver. This will be powered of a coin cell. I see that the NRF51422 is low power, but I am confused about how to program it... is the software available able to load a defined program on the NRF51422 much like any other microcontroller? or this chip is only useful for handling the signal transmission?

Is there another NRF chip that comes in a more friendly package, like soic or QFN? maybe less pins, but easier to prototype?

Thanks.. A little bit of pointers will go a long way. Right now I am using the NRF24L01 with an atmel micro, but I want to save space in my board by combining mcu and transmission in one chip.

[RK]

Yes you can program the nrf51822, it's a full MCU as well as radio and peripherals (it has an ADC on it by the way if you want to avoid using the SPI ADC, it also has SPI so you can read the SPI ADC if you use that).

the NRF51822 does come in QFN, it's one of the packaging options.

I suggest buying the development kit, it's cheap, it has an integrated JLink debugger you can use for testing your code and also programming your custom boards after you make them.

Nordic also has the nRF52 series chips which are even lower power and have even more features. I haven't tried hand-prototyping those yet, they have a pretty tight footprint which is more complicated than QFN (but not quite as bad as BGA).

[RK]

no - but you need some kind of programmer which talks SWD. The advantage of the nordic board is that first off it's a good dev board, secondly all the examples are designed to work with it (buttons,leds,UART..) and third it has JLink-OB which both programs the on board nRF51 and can also be used for debug out, ie to program a custom board with an nRF51 on it. It's a good way to develop the custom software you're going to put on your actual board. Or get a Segger JLink or a guy here sells IDAP-Link as a standalone programmer.

You'll need to put some kind of debug header on your custom board, probably best to stick to the 0.5" FTSH 10 pin connector (there are cheaper versions) as you just then use a straight thru from the nRF51 to your board.

GCC works, very terminal-ish. If you are doing non-commercial work I like Segger Embedded Studio for IDE. Some people like eclipse, I don't.