RE: Differences between nrf52 DKs

Daniel Slotcavage — Mon, 09 May 2022 15:12:47 GMT

Excellent; that's very clear and helpful. Thank you, Einar!

RE: Differences between nrf52 DKs

Einar Thorsrud — Mon, 09 May 2022 11:48:32 GMT

Hi Dan,

Some nRF52 variants have their own DKs. For nRF52 variants with no dedicated DK there is typically support for using another DK (like the nRF52 DK for the nRF52810). You can see which DK is suitable for which ICs under Development hardware.

Regarding the nRF52 DK this is called that and not then RF52832 DK for historical reasons (it was the first DK for the nRF52 series). You can think of it as a "nRF52832 DK".

[quote user=""]My question is: how portable is code between each of these SoCs?[/quote]

Generally very portable. You can for instance see that in the SDK examples, where most examples will work on any DK provided the IC it is built for has the required resources (for instance a USB example will obviously only work with an IC that has the USB peripheral, and some examples requiring a lot of memory will not work on a device with a small amount of memory). This is because the lower layer drivers and hardware abstraction layer (HAL) will abstract away most differences. We provide specific support in the SDKs for the combinations we encourage though, which is also where there are more similarities in HW. For instance, in the nRF Connect SDK the "normal" target board for nRF52 DK projects is nrf52dk_nrf52832, but there are also target boards called nrf52dk_nrf52810 and nrf52dk_nrf52805 which are for "emulating" those respective ICs on a nRF52 DK.

[quote user=""]Relatedly, can one DK be used to program any blank, external SoC (e.g. the nrf52832 DK to program a nrf52840, etc.)?[/quote]

Yes, any nRF52 series DK can be used as a programmer for any nRF52 series device.

Einar