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]

I know nothing about the Stellaris solution from TI, but with the nRF51822, 32 kB is for sure not fake, and you can easily both compile and debug applications above 16 kB with the evaluation toolchain. In fact, all our SDK applications are below 32 kB as far as I know, so it should be sufficient for a lot of applications. There are also no limitations on commercial use, so you can legally use this even for your final product.

As for other IDEs, I have only tested Keil, IAR and Eclipse and all of them work. There are basically endless opportunities here though, and for personal use, I tend to rely on GCC, Makefiles and Vim, combined with command-line GDB for debugging. I guess it's mostly a matter of personal preference.