alt Hacker News> Nordic makes some good products
and godawful software. the SDK for their NRF52/3/4 is pure madness, i haven't even managed to set up the toolchain, documentation always out of date. They used to have another toolchain for the older parts, but good luck setting it up now.
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I don’t think most have this experience. Zephyr is the future.
I spent so much time trying to get the SDK working for NRF52 that I genuinely just gave up and redesigned our whole product to use an ESP32 instead of the NRF plus other uC.
I think that is genuinely the reason espressif is eating everyone's lunch. All the old players in the IC business have such inexcusably bad SDKs that the acceptably designed and documented ESP-IDF framework just makes the most sense to use. Why would I spend six weeks fighting with Nordic SDKs with their weird system-wide installation when ESP-IDF can be set up in five minutes isolated to your user directory?
Seriously, it takes longer to find the correct Nordic SDK installer than it does to git clone, idf.py install, ./export.sh
And Nordic's weird documentation web portal is just egregiously bad. Espressif puts it in a static HTML page with a selector for the framework version. It's simple, elegant, and fast.
I did like using the NRF52 once it was finally behaving, but the ESP is just so easy.
Segger Embedded Studio is a complete solution. One installer. You might need to pick an older version to go with an old SDK version, but its very straightforward.
I'm sorry you've had a bad experience but I don't agree, I prefer it to the ST, TI and definitely the Microchip tooling. It's CLI first, like the Espressif and Pico tooling which is a big plus for some and not for others.
Also, no mandatory login walls for toolchains and datasheets gets them a lot of goodwill in my book.