61–70 of 122 posts
The premade compliant modules, shifting to riscv, providing a rust sdk, and so on.
I like Nordic products in some ways but they are becoming very complex and not necessarily in all the right ways.
Esp32 having ble and Wi-Fi in a single part is especially appealing, add in I can now program in rust and avoid all the cruft of C and it’s becoming an ever harder sell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
nRF5 is indeed inferior SDK of the 2 (thus abandoned). Also I dislike that a big chunk of the stack there is a binary blob. Regarding the code organization, not sure what toolchain you used, but the latest recommendation for nRF5 (Segger studio) could make it fairly easy to do this, but manually opening the project config files and changing them, not through the GUI. nRF Connect is a different world, comes with a lot…
> nRF5 is indeed inferior SDK of the 2 (thus abandoned). Also I dislike that a big chunk of the stack there is a binary blob. Regarding the code organization, not sure what toolchain you used, but the latest recommendation for nRF5 (Segger studio) could make it fairly easy to do this, but manually opening the project config files and changing them, not through the GUI. Yes, I ended up editing the .emProject files by…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can get started with esp32 for $5. Nordic devkits are more expensive, and going past that requires a JTAG programmer, which is an expensive option for hobbyists and students. It's not surprising that they have taken off like they have. Initially it was because it was inexpensive, but now the community is huge and that is a very attractive selling point.
For $9.90 you get a Seeed Xiao NRF52840[1] board with Arduino support. In sleep mode it consumes just 1µA. In my spare time I'm building smart locks with these that last for up to 2 years with a CR123 battery. Recently I switched from Arduino to the nrf Connect SDK and a tiny nrf52832 board that cost just 4$ on AliExpress. Works like a charm. [1] https://www.seeedstudio.com/Seeed-XIAO-BLE-nRF52840-p-5201.h...
Out of curiosity, how do you flash the nrf52832 board?
Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.
They have excellent documentation, and their register-level APIs are relatively high level. Most of their chips fall into this or a related niche: good-enough computating and IO capabilities with RF for battery-powered devices. If I were to build something like this, they'd be my top choice. I wish they would move away from the third-party suppliers for making their integrated modules. So you could buy a 'nRF-53 modu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely! And make sure to sell to consumers too if you want to compete. Anecdotal, but I wanted to build a 3D printer, most parts are simply not available in the EU if you are normal person. Even stuff like hex-bolts and t-nuts are impossible to source in the EU outside of specialty webshops where the markup is 2000%. And that was just the mechanical parts...
Do you not have anything like Home Depot/Grainger/McMaster-Carr in the EU? A quick check shows 3/8"-16 T-Nuts are $10/10, $15/50, and $33/100 respectively, with the first two available within a 15 minute drive of my location in the US.
The small local hardware store near me is great for common things like M3+ screws, but understandably doesn't stock slightly exotic items like M1.6 threaded inserts. There's larger e-shops that sell those, though I can't speak to the markup. Larger parts are generally easier to find.
Smells like leverage for the next time they renew their ARM license.
While you might be right, I suspect there will be some years of people doing chips in both ARM and RISC-V to trial balloon it and see how it goes. Most customers will already have ARM toolchain they'd just prefer to stick with. But if it works out for them, I think it will be far more than a marketing play. Having control over the ISA and dropping the license fee while still getting access to industry standard toolch…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors" That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese competition". Going forward, IoT security is going to be an increasingly important factor for new designs. The EU is quite serious about combating security problems with IoT devices. And security is something that the new products coming out of Nordic is very serio…
Isn't TrustZone inherently evil, though? Isn't its main use to let the megacorps trust that your device won't do what you want and will keep secrets from you?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power. People claim that there is no efficiency difference in ISAs, but why did Intel not implement a low power processor to compete with ARM, even when it had a process advantage? Maybe they could have pulled it off in terms of power budget but the implementation was too hard.
>I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power. Complexity also benefits - instead of having to do 12 different simple instruction, you can just do the one obscure instruction appropriate to the situation. The question is whether the actual perf benefits outweigh the costs, and the only correct answer to this is to actually measure what…
That one instruction just turns into 12 micro-ops, though, and then you need a much more complicated front-end to decode it. (And a smart enough compiler to use it in the first place.)
You do benefit from higher code density, but when you compare real-world RISC and CISC code the size difference is arguably small enough that it's not worth it, especially when there are other improvements to spend resources on that provide more benefits, like better branch prediction.
Also, instruction sets like ARM and RISC-V aren't needlessly minimalist, so you still get "extra" instructions such as vector/SIMD extensions where it makes sense. The old-school kitchen-sink instruction sets aren't popular any more for a reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits. Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.
You can get started with esp32 for $5. Nordic devkits are more expensive, and going past that requires a JTAG programmer, which is an expensive option for hobbyists and students. It's not surprising that they have taken off like they have. Initially it was because it was inexpensive, but now the community is huge and that is a very attractive selling point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having bought a few hundred thousand Nordic chips I can assure you they don’t care about security in a meaningful sense. All Nordic chips are susceptible to bootloader attacks which make them a poor choice for storing key material. This can be mitigated in the design phase by adding an external security chip like a ATECC608B but if you were to tear down a device and see a board present without this module it certainl…
The famous APProtect bug was patched in a silicon rev IIRC. Unless you're thinking of another exploit