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Re:The amazing $1 microcontroller (2017) by foldr on Thursday September 10, 2020 @03:58AM (#24429959)
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/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.
Re:The amazing $1 microcontroller (2017) by jwr on Thursday September 10, 2020 @05:09AM (#24430328)
No. 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.

Re:The amazing $1 microcontroller (2017) by foldr on Thursday September 10, 2020 @05:56AM (#24430654)
Thanks, useful info.
Re:The amazing $1 microcontroller (2017) by brusselssprouts on Thursday September 10, 2020 @08:24AM (#24431600)
I 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.
Re:The amazing $1 microcontroller (2017) by foldr on Thursday September 10, 2020 @08:27AM (#24431623)
Oh, 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.