License for KEIL MDK is EXPENSIVE. Any way around??

[dinesh]

I am starting my development work with Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 Device and already purchased the Development kit. What i wanted to ask is do i need to purchase KEIL MDK 500 License to write my code/application? Because the Low energy soft devices themselves takes up space of 64KB -128 KB. Kindly suggest and explain, do i need to purchase SUPER EXPENSIVE license (£3,349.14 = $ 5412) of KEIL MDK500 to compile any application code with BLE soft-devices stack of Nordic Semiconductor? and is there any way around to escape the license cost?

[Ole Morten]

There isn't anything further to add here. The Guest who commented above here is correct that the softdevice doesn't count towards the 32 kB, and most applications should hence be within.

If not, you can, as KPE said, consider setting up GCC and Eclipse or some other IDE, which doesn't have any code size limitations at all.

I'd be happy if you could either accept KPE's answer, or potentially post whatever you ended up doing as a separate answer and then accepting that. :)