Arduino IDE vs. SDK for nRF52 development

[nickagianFT]

Hi,

I have a quite controversial question I want to ask! I am new to the world of Nordic Semiconductor chipset and I need some information in order to decide which way to go. I am not sure if this is the right audience to ask this question, but anway, here we go.

The question is, why would someone choose the Arduino IDE instead of the SDK for fw development with nRF52 family?

I understand of course that using the Arduino IDE is more straightforward at the initial phase. You know, until you make it work and you are able to write and flash your first program. Perhaps also later on, development might be faster.

But apart from that, I want to understand what are the limitations of the Arduino IDE.

- Can I achieve a really low power product?
- Is the Flash and RAM memory going to be a problem? I for example see that a fairly simple fw with one BLE characteristic and a sensor library with the Arduino NANO 33 BLE eats a fairly big chunk of the NRF52840 memory, around 280kB of program memory and 65kB of dynamic memory. Which of course means you cannot use the lower-end chips (like the nRF52810, not even the nRF52832).
- What else do I loose by using Arduino IDE instead of the SDK?

Thank you in advance,
Nikos

[Marjeris Romero]

Hi,

If you want to make a product with production quality you should use the nRF5 SDK or the Nordic Connect SDK (NCS), these two are the only officially supported SDKs for nRF devices. The Arduino support is written by a third party, and it's not something you will get support for here at Devzone.

I am not very familiar with the Arduino API myself so I don't think I can comment on the memory figures and the low power question. I think for the memory question the figures are quite similar. The unmodified HRS example for S132 in the nRF5 SDK uses ~235kB of flash and 33kB of RAM (this includes the Softdevice). As far as I know the Arduino API requires a bootloader which I suppose takes some space...

Best regards,

Marjeris