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

[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