Some GPIO pins show HIGH et al.

[onehorse]

I just assembled my first nRF51822 board and I was able to program it using an IDAP-LINK and a blinky program compiled with the Eclipse/GCC toolchain flashed via SWDIO/SWDCLK. All good.

I noticed however, that the SWDIO and Pin 11 were both at 3V3 for no apparent reason I can detect. Is it expected that these or any other GPIO pins will show HIGH for no apparent reason?

Also, I soldered the nRF51822 chip to the thermal pad. I don't do this for the nRF24L01+, but i can't find anywhere the "proper" way to mount the nRF51822 wrt the thermal pad. Is soldering it recommended?

Lastly, will there ever be an Arduino IDE available for the nRF51/2 chips?

Thanks!

Thanks.

[onehorse]

Thanks for the answers!

I meant P0.11. For some reason this pin is also HIGH on my board. I noticed on another nRF51822 module I bought that RX was also HIGH. Maybe pin P0.11 defaults to RX? I don't really understand this.

There are some ARM-based microcontrollers that have ported libraries such that an Arduino IDE can be used to program them. Most famously is the Teensy and RedBearLabs has a similar Arduino IDE for programming the nRF51822 nano board. Intel's Edison (an X86 "micrcontroller") also has an Arduino IDE that can be used for programming it in addition to the more traditional tool chain approach. I am simply asking if Nordic (or anyone else) has a plan to make the nRF5X SoCs programmable via an Arduino-like IDE?

I'll try RedBear Labs Arduino IDE on my board to see if I can use it. I know the standard approach is to use mbed or a tool chain like Keil or Eclipse; I am using them, or trying to learn to use them. But the Arduino IDE is very easy to use and I already have dozens of Arduino C++ "sketches" that I wrote to control sensors and motors that I would like to be able to use without having to completely rewrite everything. At least this would be the benefit of an Arduino-like IDE to me and I suspect many others.

[onehorse]

I received the RedBearLab nRF51822 BLE Nano today and was easily able to blink the on-board led using mbed as you say. The nano mounts on an MK20 programmer that plugs into the pc via a USB connector. I'm happy to report I was also able to use the MK20 programmer to upload an mbed hex file to my custom board. My nRF51822 is now polling an MPU9250 9 DoF motion sensor via I2C, performing sensor fusion on the scaled data at 400 Hz, and reporting quaternions and Euler angles through an FTDI link to Serial on my laptop every second. Next step is to use the BLE engine to replace the Serial wire. Looks like this method works well and is a whole lot easier to use than the traditional tool chains (at least for me).