Selecting Development Board

For testing the application quickly, we need a development kit. The development kit consists required SoCs and all the other necessary components, Pins to make connections, and testing application.

There are multiple official and third-party development Kits are available.

For nRF52 Series, Nordic Semiconductor offers Development Kits.

1. nRF52 DK (for nRF52805, nRF52810, and nRF52832 SoCs.)
2. nRF52833 DK (for the nRF52820 and nRF52833 SoCs)
3. nRF52840 DK (for nRF52811 and nRF52840 SoCs)

All the Development kits have onboard J-Link Debugger, which allows programming and debugging SoCs.

Development Kits Buying options are available on the Nordic Semiconductor website. Also, you can find the purchase option at the bottom of this document.

You can select the development kit SoCs based on your needs. Here, we have selected nRF52840-DK.

nRF52840-DK

PCA Number: PCA10056

Also, the nRF52840-Dongle is similar to the nRF52840-DK, but it doesn’t have an on-board debugger, so the debugging is not supported. The dongle can be programmed via USB using the nRFConnect desktop app.

Onboard SOC: nRF52840 and PCA number: PCA10059.

Installing Necessary Software

After getting the development kit, we need to install the following software.

nRF5 SDK

The nRF5 SDK is a set of tools, modules, libraries, and examples for the nRF51 and nRF52 series.

Download the latest version of nRF5 SDK from the Download Page.

Once you select the latest version in the changelog, go to the bottom of the page and click download. You can unselect the SoftDevices options for now.

After download, for having an organized folder structure, you can create a folder path and extract the downloaded Zip file C:\nRF5_SDK\ v17.0.2\, so we can manage new versions in the same folder.

IDE

The latest version of nRF5 SDK (v17) supports IDE: ARM GCC, SES, IAR, Keil5.

SEGGER Embedded Studio (SES) 

It is a Powerful IDE to use, also recommended by Nordic Semiconductor, and offers a Free Commercial license for use with its products.

You can download the IDE on the SEGGER download page. It is available for Windows 32/64 bit, Linux 32/64 bit, and macOS.

After Installation, to activate the License open SEGGER Embedded Studio à Tools à License Manager

Activate the License by filling in the details.

For now, we can start with nRF5_SDK and SES for basic programming.

We will need further tools for application development, which we will see in the later part