Holiday Bluetooth/ Embedded Engineer: buy BLE development toys
When I started to survey BLE technology, I am well aware that the battlefield of BLE development is device. To fully understand BLE technology, I shall develop my own BLE devices. After some surveying, I had 2 candidates:
Prices of development kit of both platform is inexpensive: ~3000NTD ($100 USD). It's time to pick up one. But I found there's a lot of cheaper hardware in China's Taobao. By searching nRF51822 and CC2541, I found a lot of "enhanced" development boards with much lower prices. The board equipped with USB to serial IC (PL2303) which is very convenient to developers. They even put cloned J-Link on the board, which makes the board very easy to use.
I had some comment to J-Link here. Segger offered low-cost (~$80USD) J-Link EDU that is the same as J-Link except commercial usage. Since it's inexpensive, I think J-Link EDU is worth of investment.
Eventually, I bought both platforms since they were so cheap @ ~2400NTD ($80USD):
- TI CC2541
8051, 8KB-RAM, 128/256KB-FLASH - Nordic nRF51822
Cortex-M0, 16KB-SRAM, 128/256KB-FLASH
Both solutions BLE SoC. I like TI's great documentation and sample codes. TI's SensorTag is an excellent sample BLE device with firmware source code and Android/ iOS application source code which could accelerate studying. Being a holiday engineer, starting from an example is much better than from scratch. However, I personally don't like 8051. That's the weakest point of TI's solution.
In Nordic's website, they didn't allow users to download documents freely as TI. I probably need to buy their development kit then I can gain access to these data. I spent some time to find its documents & examples to ensure that they also provided similar sample projects as TI. I'm more familiar to ARM's CPU and I already invested ARM-based JTAG tool (J-Link EDU). So I prefer using nRF51822.
Prices of development kit of both platform is inexpensive: ~3000NTD ($100 USD). It's time to pick up one. But I found there's a lot of cheaper hardware in China's Taobao. By searching nRF51822 and CC2541, I found a lot of "enhanced" development boards with much lower prices. The board equipped with USB to serial IC (PL2303) which is very convenient to developers. They even put cloned J-Link on the board, which makes the board very easy to use.
I had some comment to J-Link here. Segger offered low-cost (~$80USD) J-Link EDU that is the same as J-Link except commercial usage. Since it's inexpensive, I think J-Link EDU is worth of investment.
Eventually, I bought both platforms since they were so cheap @ ~2400NTD ($80USD):
- nRF51822 development board
- CC2541 development board
- CC debugger for TI's CC2541
- CC2541 based BLE sniffer
I guess I would have much fun with these toys in later weeks.
留言