Can I directly start programming a nrf51822 breakout board

[Mad]

Hi guys, I want to know if it is possible to get started on developing applications for nRF51822 without using the evaluation kit. I want ot have a couple of breakout boards made and buy a debugger to flash the code on the board. Is this even possible? Also are there are good docs which tell us how to get started?

[Christopher Mason]

I've made some limited progress towards using the McHck to program and debug an nRF51822 dev board. I don't have breakpoints working yet, but I'm hopeful that with some help from the McHck folks, we'll get that working.

For those of you following along at home, however, I still recommend the Dev Kit as the best way to get started, and the only way to get legal access to the soft device BLE stack.

I'm hoping that Nordic will take notice of the fact that a fully-open-source toolchain exists for their great chip, and allow access to the soft device binary without a Dev Kit license.

I'll keep this updated as we progress.

Thanks,

-c

PS– @marc, you don't need special PHY, etc to write an open source BLE stack for the nRF51822. The existing, closed source stack uses the well documented radio, address resolver, etc features of the nRF51822 chip. It would be a lot of work though to reimplement this well.

[Mad]

Thats some commendable work you have done. Its awesome. The only problem with using mc hck is that you cant buy it off the shelf. You need to make the boards and then you have the chicken and egg problem and without having a bus pirate or bus blaster or Jlink lite there is no other way to program the Mc hck.

[Christopher Mason]

I believe the McHck folks are working on an [url=https://mchck.org/blog/2013-08-13-self_hosted_toolchain_the_mc_hck_as_swd_adapter/]Arduino sketch bitbang implementation[/url]. Personally, I'm adding the MKL2/MK20 chip to my existing design. The key in my mind is their SWD implementation is simple and readable, as compared with something like OpenOCD which has layers and layers of support for stuff like JTAG that I don't need.