Documentation and Resources for Eclipse Development

You have your choice of development tools for working with the Nordic nRF51x22 chips. If you want to use Eclipse + GCC for development, there are some app-notes and blog posts to help you on the way.

nAN-29 Development with GCC and Eclipse

This application note contains instructions from Nordic Semiconductor on using Eclipse and GCC for development. There are a few things to note, however.

• The instructions are specific to Windows, though with some imagination, you can adapt them to Linux and OS X.
• The instructions don't make use of GNU ARM Eclipse Plug-ins. Specifically, they don't use the SEGGER J-Link Eclipse plugin and they use a makefile instead of the managed build plugin.
• The application note hasn't been updated for version 7.1.0 of the SDK.

Tools for OS X Development

If you're using Eclipse on OS X, this is a list of tools that may be helpful.

Development with Eclipse and GCC

This blog post references the application note above, and is a little more up-to-date. One nice thing about this blog post over the application note is that it uses the SEGGER J-Link plugin.

• It also uses a makefile instead of a managed build.
• It hasn't been updated for version 7.1.0 of the SDK.
• It's specific to Windows--i.e. make flash is not going to work out of the box on OS X.

Getting started with nRF51 development on Mac OS X

While not specific to Eclipse (in fact, Eclipse isn't used at all in this blog post), it has excellent information on using GCC and makefiles for development on the Mac.

• It's updated for version 7.0.0 of the SDK.
• It contains instructions for flashing firmware from the command line using the SEGGER J-Link tools on OS X.

Software Development with nRF51 Series Bluetooth Low Energy SoC

This blog is up-to-date. It's an excellent source for getting everything working at a low price-point:

• It uses the IMM-NRF51822 ($22.95) module instead of the nRF51-DK (~$70).
• It includes instructions for using OpenOCD with the IDAP-Link ($45) instead of SEGGER J-Link (though an external J-Link can also be used with the IMM-NRF51822).
• It includes instructions for using the third-party EHAL source tree (to facilitate portability between devices). If you don't want to use EHAL, just ignore the steps that mention it.
• This blog also includes a modification you need to make in the SDK in order to use C++.