NRF 52840 development board recommendation

[natebc]

I hope I am posting this in the right place but I am looking into learning more about developing devices that use Bluetooth. I have been looking into getting a dev board but it seems like I have a few options. I've found the nRF52 DK and a SparkFun Pro nRF52840 Mini - Bluetooth Development Board. I am an Electrical Engineering student and have done plenty of work with PIC microcontrollers (PIC32,PIC16) and their development boards using MPlab software for programming. I've also played around with a decent amount of hobbyist microcontrollers programming them with the Arduino IDE. I have recently been experimenting with various Bluetooth enabled microcontrollers (Arduino Nano 33 BLE/IOT, Adafruit itsy bitsy nRF5280). It appears they both use the nRF5 SDK to program them so I'm not quite sure which one I should go with to start to learn more about Bluetooth development. From what I can tell the only big difference is the SparkFun board may not have as many of the chip pins broken out to the board as the nRF52 DK. The SparkFun board also seems to be able to do some programming through the Arduino IDE but I'm not very interested in being limited to the Arduino library capabilities. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you

[Didrik Rokhaug]

Hi,

I would recommend that you get one of our DKs. They come with an on-board debugger, which makes it much easier to program and debug them.

They are also supported out-of-the-box with our SDKs, while you might have to add the relevant board specific files if you use another board.

We will also be able to provide more support on our boards and on our SDKs.

That said, both the nRF5 SDK and nRF Connect SDK should work on all third party boards, so you should be able to access the same software functionality on all boards.

Best regards,

Didrik