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?

[RK]

I use Crossworks, I've written about that many times before here. I'm on a Mac but Crossworks works on Windows too (not that I've tried it).

You can certainly use Eclipse and gcc and there are loads of discussions here about getting that setup and running, lots of examples. That's free although there's an amount of learning and configuration you have to do and I found the debugging experience a bit fragile, because it relies on gdbserver which isn't the most stable of components. But it's free, and it works, and when you get it set up and learn it it's pretty usable, more usable than the crufty old Keil in my opinion. There's occasionally some pain when it comes time to upgrade things but that's rare.

I ended up with Crossworks, which isn't free but is very reasonably priced for non-commercial use and not unreasonably priced if you want to go commercial. It's designed for embedded development as opposed to Eclipse which is designed for general development and can be configured to do embedded. It works natively with JLink (and some other debuggers) instead of using gdbserver which means the debugging experience is fast and complete and very stable. This was a key point for me. They support Nordic, which means they have the register maps and peripheral maps and configurations for softdevices. There's a learning curve, every IDE has a learning curve, but I'm now super-productive with Crossworks to the point the IDE gets out of the way and I can entirely concentrate on writing code. I personally never found Eclipse quite as frictionless and I wouldn't use Keil if you paid me.

There's also a side benefit that Crossworks happens to work with other dev kits from (ahem) other manufacturers too, which has been rather useful as I tend to collect development boards at an unhealthy rate.