Re:We're making an open-source $30 GPS/mesh radio, would lik...
by donquichotte on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @02:44AM
(#22543637)
Good advice. I also recommend to make sure the toolchain is usable and documentation is readily available.
I worked on a project that had an Silicon Labs EFR32, and while the hardware may have been great, their proprietary, closed-source "Radio Abstraction Interface Layer" was hard to use and badly documented.
The Eclipse based IDE that you HAD to use to configure the radio front-end (the EFR32 is a system-on-chip with an RF front-end and an ARM Cortex M4F core) is a GUI, and porting or comparing radio configs between different chip generations, and even different versions of the IDE, is a nightmare.
The Java IDE crashes regularly, debugging does not really work etc., so it really is worth taking some time to evaluate the whole package around an RF IC.
I worked on a project that had an Silicon Labs EFR32, and while the hardware may have been great, their proprietary, closed-source "Radio Abstraction Interface Layer" was hard to use and badly documented.
The Eclipse based IDE that you HAD to use to configure the radio front-end (the EFR32 is a system-on-chip with an RF front-end and an ARM Cortex M4F core) is a GUI, and porting or comparing radio configs between different chip generations, and even different versions of the IDE, is a nightmare.
The Java IDE crashes regularly, debugging does not really work etc., so it really is worth taking some time to evaluate the whole package around an RF IC.