With the alpha release of nRF5 SDK v11.0 in December 2015, we took a major step to enable the smooth migration path within the nRF5x family for developers. A clear indicator of this, is visible by the name nRF5 SDK, compared to the previous nRF51 and nRF52 SDK’s. Developers will find ready examples for all active Nordic Semiconductor Development kits with this release.
Some other features I would like to highlight for this release are:
BLE Peer Manager is now out of experimental
The Peer Manager is a state of the art management system for handling bonded devices and all its context. It replaces the BLE Device manager known from previous SDK releases. The major advantage with the introduction of BLE Peer Manager compared to BLE Device Manager, is the ability to concurrently handle bonding information while the SoftDevice operates as central and peripheral in the same implementation. The peer manager may easily be configured at compile time to support any setup you may want for your S130 or S132 v2.0 implementation. Among flexible parameters, you will find numbers of active peers, application context size and active numbers of connections to be handled concurrently.
Micro Enhanced ShockBurst (uESB) has been completely reworked
The ESB has been through a major improvement. We have re-built uESB completely from scratch, based on a more modern approach which has been available on Nordic Github for a while – the nRF51 uESB. We have added nRF52 support and an internal test framework to ensure wide testing and high quality if the implementation. Existing uESB users will experience some obvious benefits with this release compared to older uESB-lib:
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The source code is available, allowing anyone to make changes to the code if necessary
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Packet timing is tighter, allowing quicker data transfer and higher overall data rate
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Extended compatibility with certain ESB configurations, such as fixed payload length (the official lib supports dynamic payload length only)
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Footprint is smaller compare to the ESB solution distributed with the existing SDK
Examples and support for Bluetooth LE Secure Connections
With S130 and S132 v2.0 we are introducing support for LE Secure Connections.
All BLE and peripheral examples are now delivered precompiled in the SDK
With SDK v10.0, we also introduce a simple service for you as customers by including most examples pre-compiled in the SDK. This makes it very easy for you to test and verify the examples before bothering to dig into the source code. For your convenience, we have merged any applications that require a SoftDevice with the relevant SoftDevice. This makes all precompiled examples drag-and-drop ready. You may find the precompiled examples in a hex-folder among board project folders. In example: examples\peripheral\blinky\hex\blinky_blank_pca10040.hex
Deprecation of CMSIS Packs
With this release, we are also deprecating support for CMSIS Packs. For further information on this, please see the statement issued here
There is more…
This is only a subset of features I wanted to highlight. For a more complete list, please check out the release notes. I hope you find these improvements welcome. Don’t hesitate to give us feedback on your experience moving to nRF5 SDK v11.0.0 through dev-zone or mypage. In the end, we are doing this for you, and are depending on your input to enable you creating awesome products for our nRF5 series devices.
Download the nRF5 SDK 11.0 here on the download tab.
