nRF5 SDK removed from website

[nrbrook]

The nRF5 SDK zips are available here: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK

For previous major versions Nordic kept old versions on the server, e.g. 15.2.0 when 15.3.0 was released.

For 17.x.x Nordic is deleting old versions. This is not helpful for external scripts and tools that depend on these builds being available. I maintain https://github.com/NRB-Tech/nRF5-cmake-scripts which automatically downloads the SDK, which broke when Nordic removed the 17.0.0 build. In future it would be great if old builds could be left on the server.

Thanks

[mrono]

I think they only delete them in case a major flaw is discovered very shortly after release. I believe this is what happened with 17.0.0, and I seem to recall 15.1 was similar.

[Kenneth]

Yes, that is the case. Also see release notes for v17.0.2.

[nrbrook]

It wouldn't be so bad if 17.0.2 had stuck with 7.0.1 softdevice, but if there is a critical bug fix which requires the previous version to be removed then surely the minimum amount of changes are made, and for a minor softdevice version change that should surely require a minor SDK version change instead of a patch?

As such the change from 17.0.0 to 17.0.2 required much more work than just changing the version number in the scripts.

[Kenneth]

I would expect that to upgrade from S132 7.0.1 to 7.2.0 softdevice the change you need to do is to update the S132 softdevice header files and re-compile the project, then program the S132v7.2.0 softdevice + compiled application. Doesn't this work?

[nrbrook]

The project I maintain uses NRF mesh sdk which has to be modified to support 7.2.0 as it isn’t kept up to date in line with nRF5 SDK releases, so that required a fair bit of work. Along with making sure linker scripts are still correct with any flash and memory requirement changes.