What do I need to change from TI CC2640 to Nordic solution?

[Ralph]

Hi there,

I am done with TI and the new IDE and Stack 2.2

May be anybody can point me to the right IDE and chip to replace my TI CC2640 4x4 designs to Nordic semiconductor solutions.

I would expect one IDE, free of course, for all project which may come up, but I am confused for all this different IDE's which seem to pre decide the final solution.

Also what chip comes close to the size of the CC2640 4x4 and 5x5 chip

On what dev board I can find it and use as a start

I am in a rush and need to do the replace in the next 2 weeks

Please help

Best wishes

[Dave_couling]

I'll be honest, you need a team to migrate this quickly. The nRF51822 or the nRF52 chips are comparable. But the code migration depending on your complexity will be a challenge. Download the SDK and test the example project. Then build your features on top of an example project. For IDE I use Eclipse GCC (free).

[RK]

You aren't going to do it in 2 weeks unless your project is very simple. TI and Nordic's SDKs are very different in concept, it's just going to take time to get up to speed.

Nordic's most recent chip is the nRF52832, that's 6x6 in QFN48 form and 3x3 in WLCSP. Using the most current chip will make the transition easier, and it's better, lower power, more powerful and needs a smaller BOM on the board.

Get the nRF52 development kit from any of the online vendors. You may see it referred to as PCA10040 as that's the board number, the vendors will have it listed as nRF52 Development Kit. It's cheap.

IDEs are a source of much debate. The SDK examples and templates come for Keil, IAR and command-line GCC + make. Yes Nordic does what TI always said they were going to do but didn't and actually support GCC in a way you can actually use it.

Keil and IAR aren't free at all (ok under 32kB code you can run Keil, but then you're on the hook for a gazillion bucks) and they are pretty ancient and windows only. If your development is commercial, there are few free options, Eclipse is one, I find it very janky and hard to use myself, but some people struggle on with it. I think I've seen people using Qt creator although I don't know how, codeblocks, emblocks .. All of them require some work to use.

If you are not commercial, Segger has the free Segger Embedded Studio which is the same product as Rowley Crossworks, just whiteboxed and limited to Segger's debugging tools. I like this IDE, it's what I use for all my embedded work, it's designed for embedded development and provides a much better debugging experience. Rowley also sells a non-commercial license for Crossworks fairly cheaply. You can also build TI, Atmel, ST etc products on it. They have a package for the Nordic chips and if you look over --> on the blog section you'll see that one of the Nordic guys has just written another blog post about using Segger Embedded Studio with the latest SDK, so Nordic doesn't quite support it in the released SDK yet, but I hope they will one day.

If you're commercial, none of the good IDEs is free.

[Nguyen Hoan Hoang]

This blog is a good start for free Eclipse GCC development with both C & C++ . It contains info to setup cheaper alternative for debug jtag with OpenOCD.