Programming pins of the nRF51822 chip ?

[Berk Soysal]

Hello everyone,

Could anyone tell me which pins are the programming pins of the nRF51822 chip for a QFN48 packet ? How can I program it on my custom PCB?

thanks..

[Christopher]

If you want to use the Nordic nRF Go Studio software to program your chip (SofDevice, bootloader, application), you will need a J-Link (Segger probe). I would recommend to buy an nRF 51 or 52 DK and use the J-Link available on it to program your custom board, or you can buy a Segger tool.

I you are looking for another (cheapest) alternative, you can buy a ST-LINK/V2 probe. many of them are availanle at very low cost (~ 10$). Then, you can use for instance OpenOCD to program you chip, but this is not as easy as the Segger tools and you cannot use the software provided by Nordic.

[Ady]

Yes, I have a nRF52 DK on the way. However, I'm on a Mac so nRF GO Studio is not going to work. Can I just manually merge the .hex files using srec_cat.

Any comments on this Mac port of nRF GO Studio? sourceforge.net/.../

[Christopher]

You can install the J-Link software for Mac in order to use the Segger probe. You can srec_cat to merge hex files, yes. To begin, my advice is to install the nRF5x-Command-Line-Tools-OSX so you can use the mergehex and nrfjprog tools directly. I have no experience with Mac but I did the same on Linux.