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Random question: do you happen to have any experience with any of the Dialog Semi range of Bluetooth ICs? (E.g. this one: https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/p
by foldr 6y ago
Random question: do you happen to have any experience with any of the Dialog Semi range of Bluetooth ICs? (E.g. this one: https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/connectivity/bluetooth-low-energy/products/da14531 https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/connectivity/b...). They're ridiculously cheap but don't have internal flash. I haven't had occasion to try them out so far, so I'm just curious if anyone else has.
- jwr 6y agoNo. For uC Bluetooth, I only used Nordic chips. For general-purpose uC I have lots of experience with TI MSP430 and NXP/Freescale Kinetis K and KL lines. Nordic has by far the best SDK and support of those. Having seen the complexity of BLE and Mesh, I would be very wary of using a vendor if I didn't see excellent software support. For example I wouldn't even consider Kinetis for wireless solutions, having seen how bad their SDKs were. Hardware is relatively easy to get right, software is hard.
- foldr 6y agoThanks, useful info.
- brusselssprouts 6y agoI do, their SDK is OK... but Nordic is the clear leader on tooling and SDK quality. The DA14531 has OTP memory for the final firmware and you can program and run out of RAM for testing. The firmware is typically mirrored to RAM anyway so this is pretty much indentical to how it works after programmed.
- foldr 6y agoOh, interesting. I had assumed that the usual dev setup would involve external flash rather than running the code from RAM. That sounds quite a bit easier. It seems like Nordic is the way to go unless you really need to shave every cent off your BOM cost. Thanks for responding.