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.

[azagnoev]

I have the same question. We have purchased the development kit and expecting it soon.

I tried to build the Nordic reference design nrfready_desktop_1.2.2.293 using the free Keil compiler but it was too large.

I would have thought that this is a small application that would be under 30K? Do we have to purchase the expensive Keil license for this project?

[Ole Morten]

This is not the same question as the reference design you're having is made for the nRF24LE1; our 8051-device and not the ARM Cortex-M0 nRF51822 that was the original question here. The evaluation version of Keil's 8051-compiler is unfortunately not capable of compiling more than 2 kB of code, which is not sufficient for a lot of application. You'll therefore most likely have to buy a full license.

[Fabio Parigi]

I have a NRF51 DK, can you tell me what alternative you use to Keil expensive product to compile? thanks Fabio

[Guilherme de Paula]

Fabio, please read the answers above. You can compile/link/download for FREE with Keil for most applications because it normally takes less than 32 kB. The SoftDevice does not count towards that number because it's pre-compiled and loaded separately. Cheers, Gil.