Best free IDE for NRF52-DK

[Mark]

Hi,

I was wondering what's the best free IDE to work with NRF52-DK? Is Eclipse the best choice?

Thanks

[RK]

Probably - if you want absolutely free Eclipse is about the only option. I moved away from it because it was just a little too painful and bought the non-commercial license for CrossWorks, which is 'reasonably priced'. They also have a 'free if below a certain code size' option if you want to try it out, but you will blow that option sooner or later.

[Mark]

Yeah, I tried to use Eclipse couple years ago and didn't like its user interface. Thanks for your suggestion, I'll look into it.

[RK]

Eclipse is ok really - it wasn't really designed for embedded development but if you use the right plugins (the arm one from livius which probably got even better by now) it's usable, I just never learned to love it.

My biggest problem with it I think was that it uses (pretty much has to use) gdbserver to connect to the debugger and it's amazing it works at all, even more amazing it works as well as it does, but it's nowhere near the kind of performance and stability of having a native local DLL (or equivalent on whatever architecture you're on) to connect to the Segger directly. In the end I spent just a little too much time resetting things randomly before another run.

Eclipse does have the advantage that the Nordic guys use it and post help guides for it, with Crossworks you are somewhat on your own.

[monpetit]

You can use Qt Creator with the bare metal plugin too. But that's also a tough way.

[awneil]

"Best" is meaningless without criteria by which to judge it.

So what are the key features that you are looking for in an IDE?