RTOS on NRF53

[Riaan]

Hi,

I am looking to develop some code on NRF53. Looks like only Zephyr is supported. Even the most basic example includes some Zephyr files/libs.

 Reading the docs it sounds like there is a way to use the softdevice without Zephyr. Is there a guide to this, or even just a "hello world" that does not include Zephyr?

I would like to use something like FreeRTOS.

[Kenneth]

You may look at this thread:
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/70580/softdevice-controller-example-code

It should be possible, but not something we have tested or made any examples for. We hope zephyr will cover the needs of the many. 

[Bruno Saraiva]

The more we progress here in our current development, the less I see "Zephyr covering the needs of the many"...
The mandatory Zephyr has caused us at least 6 months delay so far, and very basic functionalities are still not working in Zephyr. The project is one year old and there are bugs we can't seem to solve unless we decide to learn the realms of Zephyr and change low level issues ourselves - after which we will have a hard time to use main Zephyr updates...
We are seriously considering to propose to our customer another 6 months delay on the project, and come up with our 'bare bone' solutions for nRF5340 with FreeRTOS or something similiar... Or should we go as far as redesigning the HW to use a silicon that does not force Zephyr into their developers?

[Kenneth]

Hi,

Sorry to hear that, can you try to summarize a few of the problems you are experiencing and a small wish list of how it can be improved, then I will make sure to forward that internally.

Best regards,
Kenneth

[Bruno Saraiva]

Hi Kenneth,

I don't want to spin the talk off the main subject on this thread, might post a separate one. But one example happening right now is I2C with multiple devices in one bus, one of them being a display controlled by LVGL drivers. We get several i2c_nrfx_twim: Dev I2C_1 errors, which seem to be I2C conflicts between devices... solved a similar problem in the other I2C bus adding our own semaphores to prevent devices to battle for the bus, but LVGL does not let that... But it makes no sense that a complete RTOS such as Zephyr would allow I2C bus conflict, it's probably something wrong on our configurations - but we've ran in circles for several days now without being able to find documentation to guide on this...

I guess a summary on the original topic is that we would not look elsewhere (FreeRTOS) if the examples were clear and related to real world applications, such as an I2C with multiple devices, projects with APP, APPNS and NET cores that require multiple .dts files when examples and tutorials keep saying "it's simple, you use THE dts file", and so on.

[Bruno Saraiva]

Hi again Kenneth, I'll try to create better examples along they happen. First one is about documentation, to which I've started a ticket on this link: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/74351/difficulty-using-documentation---where-or-how-to-find-api-info-on-nrf-connect-sdk