Do folks just develop inside the SDK itself?

[Nick]

I've been playing around with the SDK these past few days using both Keil and ARM GCC options. 

When people develop a product using this SDK, do they just clone one of the examples, keeping it inside the examples/xx directory and then develop directly inside the SDK?  It feels like with the way the SDK is laid out, references all over the place, creating a blank solution outside of the SDK examples directory leads to a lot of frustration.  

Is there a clean way to create a project outside of the SDK that references includes and libraries?  The Espressif IoT Development Framework (ESP IDF) does this beautifully with just a couple environment variables.

Nick

[SRA]

I just posted something similar last night.

No, I don’t recommend working right from the SDK. I consider the SDK to be read-only so I’m certain it never gets messed up. I don’t want to be in a UART example and make a change to a peripheral driver that another application will use later.

So more or less I put the SDK in a folder and put my application near that. I made a SoftDevice template with the things I know I’ll need for my real application and a barebones no-sd template for testing external software and peripherals. I must manually adjust the paths at the start of a new project.

 A little tip if you are using Keil, the project files are .XML and you can very effectively use Find and Replace on path names.

See my other post devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../properly-update-nrf-sdk-to-14-2-in-keilv5

Oh and yes, the sdk_config.h is terrible. Nordic has a master file somewhere I’m sure but they knock it down for each example so instead of dealing with one large constant file, you need to go find the parts you’ll need and integrate them into your file. It’s REALLY DUMB. I’m considering just making a master file, esp because in Keil you get a graphical config window for it.

[tesc]

There is a base sdk_config.h at "<sdk folder>/config/sdk_config.h", although I see that for SDK 14 that file is missing a number of defines. Hopefully that will be fixed before too long.

[SRA]

Yea, I'll start my master build from that. I'm not sure what Nordic was thinking when they remove things from a config header. It doesn't make things any easier. A master/common file would be a way better idea.