What do I have to do to program Thingy:52?

[ngong]

I am new to BLE and Nordic. (I am not new to Embedded Systems.)

What I am looking for: Find a hardware and an example for BLE that I can adapt to my simple needs, e.g. program a realtime clock an set it via BLE, switch a pin according to the clock. I would like to use Eclipse CDT + GNU MCU Eclipse. If not possible, any other would do as well. I would like to find a tool for creating simple dialogs on Android, exchanging tag/value pairs with the BLE hardware.

Nordic seem to support my need but I am too new to Nordic to read the right documents: what should I buy to get started?

I bought the great Thingy:52, communicating very well with the Android app. But after a weekend of research I found out that I need some more pieces to modify the software. Which pieces, I could not find out. E.g. do I need a €500 Segger J-Link hardware, as nRF Connect suggests? ..... ???

[John]

While I haven't played with one yet the Thing:52 does look pretty neat. I think you have a couple of options - It looks like they put a programming/debugging header on the board so you could buy a J-Link and be in business with the appropriate cable. Another would be to do OTA updates with the thingy apps if they support it or nRFConnect if they don't.

Another alternative would be to purchase a nRF52 dev kit. It has the J-Link built in and you would be able to program your application quite easily. The Thingy really is overkill for the simple application you describe and the dev boards are very reasonably priced.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

If you buy the nRF52 DK, you can also use this to update the firmware of Thingy using the built-in J-Link OB debugger, no need for a separate J-Link. The firmware of Thingy can also be updated OTA from iOS/Android app using DFU.