Can MBED Studio be used with nRF52811

Mbed Studio
1

According to this documentation: Nordic Semiconductor Infocenter

The nRF52811 is a subset of the nRF52840 with smaller RAM and flash, and with less peripheral resources. Therefore, you can use nRF52840 to emulate the functionality of nRF52811.

Thus I wanted to know if it is possible to, and if so, how I could adapt the nRF52840 target definition file(s) found on MBED Studio to make them compatible for the nRF52811 chipset.

2

Hi Gerriko,

That is a good question. I do not have access to this board at the moment so I can’t confirm that it will work. However here is something you can try:

You can use custom target support in Mbed Studio. It allows to change the target association for any board connected (either directly or via external probe). More information about custom targets support can be found here: Custom targets - Supported and custom targets | Mbed Studio Documentation

  1. Please Start Mbed Studio and connect your target
  2. Please use a custom target dialog to tell Studio what target connected board is and which cmsis-pack to use for deploy/debug. Here is an example:
    Screenshot 2020-08-05 at 22.03.05
    Screenshot 2020-08-05 at 22.03.05956Ă—836 67.1 KB
  3. I do not see a definition in Mbed OS for nRF2811 so instead, you can try to use nRF52840-DK if that target is similar.
  4. Mbed Studio uses cmsis-packs to extend the list of supported targets for debugging. A Nordic Pack shipped with Studio has a definition for nRF52811_xxAA

Please only be mindful that it can potentially damage your board. Unfortunately, we do not have access to this target at the moment so can’t check it. It really depends on how similar nRF52811 and nRF52840 actually are.

It may be worth checking first if there isn’t a target definition for nRF52811. @MarceloSalazar are you aware of any? I see a similar question for it here: Is it compatible with NRF52811? - Question | Mbed

Thanks,
Arek - Mbed Studio team

3

Thanks. Now that looks very promising.

Yes, I’m not going to be experimenting just yet. as there are many unknowns and I am still learning about MBED Studio.

The areas that will need amending for this chipset will include RAM/Flash sizes and memory locations etc. and there are different clock settings.

I was also rather curious to know how MBED handles the different nRF BLE “soft device” hex files and settings for different boards.

Am I right to assume that any manual adjustments I will need, can also be made in “mbed_app.json” under the section “target_overrides”.

I look forward to all further updates.

4

I thought to share a discovery. I just happened to find that there is a README.md file within the mbed-os → targets → TARGET_NORDIC → TARGET_NRF5x that provides a good starting point to work from (if you know what you are doing).

I also discovered that the SDK used for nRF5x devices is only version 15_0 when there is now a SDK version 17 available on the Nordic website.

1 Like
5

I came across this post in the MBED forum “Custom and community boards” category, which hinted at a method on how to implement creating a customer config.

But I still need help as the documentation on configuration system (https://os.mbed.com/docs/mbed-os/v6.2/program-setup/advanced-configuration.html) does not explicitly show you how to change flash/RAM size, for example.

6

What’s the point of choosing a Deploy and Debug target if the application can’t compile for that target ?