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Introducing TechDocs: Nordic's single source for all technical documentation

Tiago Monte
Introducing TechDocs: Nordic's single source for all technical documentation

As engineers and developers creating IoT products, you will rely on various resources to bring your ideas to life. Oftentimes, one of the most indispensable resources gets overlooked, and it's one you will typically rely on the most during all stages of the development cycle: technical documentation.

This essential resource is frequently dispersed across various websites and platforms, causing users to waste valuable time searching for information rather than focusing directly on their development activities.

This is why Nordic Semiconductor is excited to introduce TechDocs (docs.nordicsemi.com), Nordic's single source for all technical documentation, where engineers and developers can find all of Nordic's technical documentation across hardware, software, tools, cloud and more. In this blog post, we will give an overview of TechDocs and highlight some of its key features and benefits.

Table of Contents

Why TechDocs?

Over the years, Nordic’s offering grew manyfold on all levels, hardware, software, wireless technologies, tools and more recently also cloud services. Our existing documentation platforms often could not satisfy and accommodate this growth, resulting in technical documentation being hosted across various websites, which has made for a confusing journey. A few examples:

As a developer-oriented company, Nordic is committed to an ongoing investment in enhancing the developer experience at every stage. Technical documentation walks alongside developers throughout their development journey, and therefore, it was time to bring a new, unified, and improved experience to our customers.

At the time of writing, TechDocs is available in the Beta stage. During Beta, the above-mentioned websites will continue to be available and content will be updated on both TechDocs and existing websites. There is a banner on each website announcing the introduction of TechDocs to bring wide awareness.

Nordic’s recommendation for all customers is to start using TechDocs as much and as soon as possible and provide feedback through the shortcut on the top right corner of each topic.

The existing websites will eventually be retired and taken offline once TechDocs comes out of Beta stage, which does not have a set date yet. When the date has been determined, both this blog and the banner text will be updated. Reroutes will be in place to ensure that links to existing documentation lead to the same content on TechDocs.

If you want to get notified about the retirement date directly in your inbox, we recommend subscribing to Nordic’s product update notifications, which you can do through our nordicsemi.com/news section.

Personalized experience

TechDocs is 100% free to use and it brings the option to create an account so you can get a richer and more personalized experience based on your individual search preferences. The search preferences are accessible from the top-right and allow you to select tags that will give higher priority to that type of content in the search results.

If you are, for example, working with the nRF5340, you can enable that as a search preference to bring nRF5340-related content higher up on your search results.

It also allows you to create topic collections, enabling you to have the most frequently used pieces of documentation readily accessible.

Landing page

The landing page gives the option to start browsing the documentation by product series or tools and services. This will lead you to sub-pages that aggregate some of the most common topics under each. Additionally, it shows you the most recently updated content on the right-hand side of the page.

The product series is more hardware-oriented (product specifications, erratas) whereas the tools and services is typically more software-oriented.

Search function

TechDocs brings improved search capabilities, which is also the recommended way to find information. Simply type what you are searching for, and you should quickly pinpoint the topic that addresses your needs.

There is the possibility to further refine the search results with filters so you can narrow down the results depending on the type of information you are looking for (e.g., software, product specifications, development kits, etc).

When searching for software/SDK-related information, it’s important to be able to narrow search results to the specific version you are developing with. This is why selecting a specific version of nRF Connect SDK is possible through the search filters.

Similarly, the SDK version can be selected from within a topic page from the top section.

Library

The library gives access to every single publication, and it’s an alternative to search where you can easily look at topics by type. For example, you could search for erratas across all products and then focus specifically on the nRF5340.

My Topics

There is some technical documentation that customers need to consult only a few times, for example, a getting started guide when we first unbox a brand new Nordic development kit, and documentation that is referred to continuously throughout certain development stages, for example, an API reference for a particular piece of functionality.

For the latter use case, we have introduced My Topics, a functionality in TechDocs that allows you to create customized documentation collections that suit your specific needs, similar to a bookmarking system within the platform itself.

For instance, if you're working on a cellular IoT application using the nRF9160 SiP, you'll probably refer to the AT Commands frequently. To avoid navigating through multiple clicks every time you need that topic, simply add it to "My Topics" for immediate access.

The bookmark icon on the top right of each page allows adding that topic & subtopics to My Topics.

Topics are added under collections, giving you a better organization ability. For example, we could add this topic under a new collection called “Cellular IoT”.

Once added, they can be easily accessed from My Topics.

Closing

At Nordic, we listen to developers and continuously invest in ease of use to ensure your time is spent doing what you do best: creating innovative and ground-breaking IoT products. Unifying all of Nordic’s technical documentation under TechDocs is yet another step in the never-ending journey of improving Nordic’s developer experience.

We will continue to listen to your opinions and strongly encourage feedback on this new platform, whether through the built-in feedback shortcut mentioned at the beginning of this blog, comments below, or through DevZone. Don’t be shy, let us know what you think, and send us your suggestions for improvement.

  • in reply to Tiago Monte

    I don't see nrf51 or nrf24 family in new TechDocs, should I try to save those somehow before it is gone or will you migrate those too?

  • in reply to Adam Varga

    Hi Adam,

    Thanks for your feedback.

    1. The initial approach was to leave nRF5 SDK documentation out of TechDocs, there are strong technical reasons behind this. But this is being looked at again based on feedback we have been receiving. Either way, the nRF5 SDK documentation will be available online, and even if it doesn't make it into TechDocs, we will provide visibility to it from within TechDocs landing page.

    2. Indeed this is something that we acknowledge needs to be improved and we are looking into it.

    3. The nRF Connect SDK is constantly being improved, whether it's the SDK itself, associated tools (e.g. VSCode extension) or documentation. Thanks for sharing your feedback on this topic, I have shared it internally to guide the improvements being made.

  • I think this change was much needed, as it's really challenging to keep up with the ocean of information that Nordic is providing now being in different locations. Please consider some feedback though:

    1. Infocenter (nRF5 SDK) has to move to Docs as well, it's a no-brainer. You cannot call Docs a "central" location if it doesn't include the Infocenter.

    2. Having different logins for different Nordic sites is super annoying and seems quite unnecessary. Please merge all into 1 Nordic account (Academy, Devzone, Docs, etc...), or at least allow Google login.

    3. I know this is not the right forum for this, but: I've been working with the nRF5 SDK for around 8 years now, and started using the NCS in the past 6months or so. I don't know if I'm alone with this or not, but it feels really unfamiliar and oftentimes confusing. I know that Zephyr brings a ton of constraints, but the organization of the information is something I just cannot comprehend. You have 'Applications', 'Samples', then 'Samples and Demos' under Zephyr, and there are some libraries that are only mentioned in relation, or under a particular application. I'd love to hear other's thoughts, but I think this illogical structure can be found in other parts of Nordic's decisions, for example, the separated locations for information. I'd love to see a more focused thinking, and way of organization across the board. But maybe this is just me.
  • in reply to NewtoM

    The goal is to improve the usability holistically when compared to all existing platforms. But we acknowledge that some customers might have developed habits around accessing documentation on existing platforms, and we encourage you to test TechDocs as much as you can, and provide feedback as to how it can be improved to meet the navigation experience that you are looking for.

  • in reply to Dom O

    In my reply above I made a mistake "will *not* be available in TechDocs", but I guess you spotted that.

    There will be online access to nRF5 SDK even after Infocenter has been retired, we will keep the same level of accessibility to ensure there is no customer impact after the transition.