Problems with programming a third-party nRF51822 board

[ImanH]

I am new to Nordic products. I have a custom nRF51822 board and I want to flash it with Keil uVision and ST-Link V/2. 

As I understood, I have to program the SoftDevice firmware first. I have downloaded nRFgo Studio and got s112_nrf52_6.1.0_softdevice.hex file. Since I don't have Nordic DKs, my device is not shown in Device Manager part. How should I download the hex file to my chip? 

[bjorn-spockeli]

Hi Iman, 

You cannot use ST-Link programmers with nRFGo Studio or our command line tool nrfjprog as they only work with Segger J-Link programmers. You can use Keil to flash firmware with ST-Link programmers, see this blog post.  Another approach is to use OpenOCD, see this post. Lastly, you could also take a look at this post. 

PS: You need to use the S130 SoftDevice for the nRF51, not the S112 which is for the nRF52832 and nRF52810. 

Best regards
Bjørn

[ImanH]

The examples in SDK 12.3 are for nRF51422. Can I use them for nRF51822?

[bjorn-spockeli]

Yes, the nRF51422 and nRF51822 are identical in terms of hardware. The only difference is that you will only be able to run the ANT protocol on the nRF51422, not the nRF51822. If you plan on using Bluetooth only then you can use both. 

[David Ledger]

Regarding SoftDevices, can you run programs without any SoftDevice at all?

[bjorn-spockeli]

Yes, we have many non-SD examples in our SDK, mostly peripheral driver and library examples, see <SDK folder>\examples\peripheral