Category: Nordic SoC

Table of Contents Overview on Nordic IoT Chips Nordic Semiconductor is a semiconductor MNC, which designs & develops a wide range of SoCs supporting IoT protocols. These SoC’s have all functionalities of Microcontroller(MCU) based on ARM cortex Processors, plus they embed 2.4ghz RF transceivers into the chips using RF-CMOS technology for making IoT chips. NRF52 and NRF51 series of SoC’s are widely accepted across the industries where there is a need for Low Power/Ultra Low Power consumption IoT solutions. Nordic Semiconductor NRF5xxx SoC is ideal for Ultralow power and cost-effective short-range wireless solutions. Typical applications for NRF5xxx SoC are: IoT(Internet of Things) devices Wearables Smart Home Wireless Mobile Phone Accessories PC Peripherals Beacons Bluetooth-enabled consumers NRF51 & NRF52 Series have all hardware support of MCU peripherals like ADC, SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO, TIMERS, etc, and 2.4ghz RF transceivers for hardware support of IoT protocols into the chip. Thus NRF5xxx series of SoC can be used for Embedded devices applications(Using MCU peripherals like UART, SPI, I2C, TIMERS, ADC, RTC, USB, etc.)and IoT applications( using protocols like BLE, ZigBee,  Thread, ANT, etc.) simultaneously. NRF5x Series supports the following short-range IoT protocols: BLE THREAD ZigBee ANT Near Field Communication  NRF Proprietary IoT protocols: ESBP & Gazell. Nordic Semiconductor also provides a full suite of IoT stacks to support of above IoT protocols. Nordic Semiconductor has named them Softdevices. To get to know about IoT protocols supported by Nordic chips you can refer to this. Nordic Semiconductor provides a wide range of development hardware from development kits to USB dongles for fast prototyping and hobbyists to play with NRF5x IoT Soc.  How to get started??  We will be using Nordic NRF52840 – DK, which is the official development board for the NRF52840 SoC. Now when I first got the NF52840 DK, it is very different from Arduino, STM, ESP boards. It has lots and lots of chips on it and quite fascinating to explore what all hardware is on it for what purposes. nRF52840-Development Kit At the same time, it is very confusing for me also on how to start with these IoT chips as they have so many features and functionalities on them. From MCU peripherals to IoT stacks, Crypto engines, Power management, analog features, and many more. nRF52 and nRF51 Chips So what I decided at first will start from exploring MCU peripherals, understanding peripheral driver header, and source files: HAL & LL. Subsequently will get to know about the Development environment and SDK of NRF chips. Starting from basics at first and then will move to IoT protocols, in that also we will first start from BLE and then to other IoT protocols. Those who don’t want to explore NRF52840 MCU peripherals can directly start from the BLE part of NRF5x chips. At first, we will make some application code using NRF5x MCU peripherals like GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, TIMERS and etc. Will understand the HAL APIs provided by Nordic SDK for these peripherals. Will then interface different sensors and modules for making embedded devices. Then will understand the supported IoT protocols architecture and stacks. Now to get started with any MCU or SoC the first couple of things we have to understand are: Its Development Software: Software Development KIT(SDK), Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Debuggers, Environment setup for cross-compilation from our laptop/desktop to the designated MCU processor. Then we have to gather & understand the development board of the corresponding semiconductor chip. As development boards are the fastest and easiest way to get started with semiconductor chips. We will be using NRF52840- Development Board in this series and all the blogs and videos will be on it only.  Development Software for Nordic SoC’s Toolchain setup for Nordic SoC’s At first, we need an IDE. IDE provides a complete solution and one-stop environment for firmware development on microcontrollers. So Nordic Semiconductor provides 2 IDE for the development: Seger Embedded Studio and Arm® Keil µVision. The one which is recommended and preferred to use is Seger Embedded Studio (SES). So, in this tutorial series, we are going to use Seger Embedded Studio (SES). SES is a professional IDE that is highly recommended and used in the industry. SES is free to use for Nordic chips and its installation is pretty easy, can be downloaded from this link. Seger Embedded Studio Nordic chips are programmed and debugged using J-Links. Nordic NRF52840-DK has an onboard Jlink debugger and programmer. So we don’t have to care much about the hardware side of the debugger, but we have to install some software packs for using the Onboard J-Link debugger. We will install the Segger J-link Software and save it along with the same directory as that of SES. So that all that we have to set up for the toolchain of Nordic Chips, successfully installed the IDE and Debugger pack for Developing for Firmware on Nordic chips. At first, when we open the Segger Embedded Studio, it will open with a Hello world example as shown below. Segger Embedded Studio first time open page. How to get started with Seger Embedded Studio for NRF52840 nRF5 Series: Developing with SEGGER Embedded Studio (nordicsemi.com) Software Development Kit for Nordic SoC’s Once we have set up the toolchain, we will now explore and understand the SDK provided by Nordic. SDK includes the building blocks for developing applications. This includes the framework, peripheral libraries, Source & Header files of drivers, RF stacks, example codes for various applications, bootloaders and etc. Every MCU vendor provides the SDK, which is written in C/C++ languages to get started. One will write the source code in SES IDE using SDK provided by Nordic. Now as we navigate to the Nordic Semiconductor website under the Development Software Section, we will see there are a number of SDK packs which are listed: nRF 5 SDK nRF SDK for Mesh/Zigbee/Thread nRF Connect SDK nRF MDK Softdevices Overview of Nordiac SDK’s At first, it is very confusing for me & can’t figure out which SDK is for what