mbed or nrf51 SDK ?

[nightgoat]

Hi, i hope i'm not duplicating any questions, but i couldn't find a similar one.

I worked with other ARM micros in both mbed and Keil before, but i'm new to Nordic Semiconductor chips and BLE stuff in general. I'm to do a BLE project, and i should get a development kit next week, so right now i'm just planning on how i am going to go about programming the micro. The way i see it is i have 2 options: use nordic semi SDK to prototype in Keil, or prototype in mbed. But i struggle to find pros/cons of the two options. Are there any significant functionality/efficiency differences between the 2 ?

The way i see it is that mbed is better for fast and easy prototyping, but nrf51 SDK is more flexible to newer versions of SD's (and i would kind of expect it to be more efficient how API's are written), but i'm not too sure about it. Help.

Thanks !

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

For me, I find the SDK more flexible, more support and you can debug with jtag directly. On the other hand mBed is easier to start but very limited. Starting with mBed for quick start and migrate to the SDK once you are ready to do more is probably the best route.

To work with Eclipse & GCC follow this blog. You won't be limited with the 32KB of Keil.

[nightgoat]

Oh Thanks a lot ! Almost forgot about the 32KB Keil limitation, will probably have to use eclipse, so thanks for the link too.

[Mahesh Venkitachalam]

I have a write-up on getting started with nRF51 using GCC on OS X and windows here:

electronut.in/.../