nRF51 DK flashing other chips

[Emil]

Hi! I am looking into your products, and wonder how the workflow is.

Let's say I get the nRF51 DK to develop something reading from a sensor and sending data. The DK provides 5 nRF51422 chips. Do these come out with a breakout so it's easy to connect? How are these chips flashed with the DK?

[RK]

No they are 5 chips on tape cut off a reel. They would need to be soldered, I assume professionally/commercially as they are just bare chips. I've lots at least one strip of mine, they're really rather tiny.

Once you built a board and got the chips mounted on them and all the ancillary components added, crystals, power supply etc, then you can flash them with the DK's debug out. That's the easy bit however, you'd have to design and build a board first.

[Emil]

Thanks! I don't have equipment and experience to do such soldering. Do you know of any minimal boards? Redbearlab?

[RK]

I'm confused by this thread. You said you were thinking of getting a DK and asked what to do with the 5 chips. I wonder if you realise that the samples are just part of the dev kit, and not that important a part. The DK is a board with an nrf51422 already on it, with buttons and LEDs, crystals, a UART connection, antenna, everything fully functional, working, with a segger programmer on board ready for development. You can take it out of the box, connect it up, start working and download code to it for testing.

You can also, later, if you have a custom board at some point in the future, use the DK to program that. This makes the DK pretty economic, you get everything you need to develop plus effectively a JLink you can use to program other boards (heck mine even programs TI boards!).

If you were thinking you had to solder one of the supplied chips to get started, you misunderstood.

[Emil]

I understand that the dev board already has a chip on it, and that you can program others. But when you develop stuff like this, you'd want at least one more to communicate with. For prototyping purposes it's just easier for me to have a version with breakout boards.