9 ms·

Nordic’s pretty good. It’s not $5/module - closer to $15 - but is very good from a low-level embedded perspective. Their toolchain is first-rate and may have be

Nordic’s pretty good. It’s not $5/module - closer to $15 - but is very good from a low-level embedded perspective. Their toolchain is first-rate and may have been validated by your target audience.

gspr 6y ago
I wish I could be enthusiastic about Nordic, but it's impossible with their extremely non-free SDK license: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/doc/12.3.0/nRF5_Nordic_license.txt https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/d... The first three clauses are fine, essentially BSD-3-clause. Clauses 4 and 5 make it extremely unfriendly to free(-as-in-freedom) projects though. I don't even understand how clause 5 benefits them. Espressif's devices are definitely not open in any sense of the word, but at least their SDK is under a bog-standard Apache license. Same goes for most of the STM SDK.
- an_d_rew 6y ago
  Nordic’s Middleware is available under a standard BSD 3-clause license. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-Tools/nRF-MDK/Download https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-To... Their middleware and DRIVER library is first rate, also BSD: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICE... They are a first-tier active founding member and supporter of the Zephyr RTOS project by the Linux Foundation. They’ve partnered with Segger for free use of Segger’s embedded studio for Nordic chips. If a fraction of other companies did a fraction of THAT, Open Source would be soooo far ahead!
  - gspr 6y ago
    Wow, that's great! Thanks for letting me know, I'll definitely take a closer look! Incidentally, do you know why they choose to keep such a restrictive SDK license when they seem otherwise FOSS-friendly?
    - an_d_rew 6y ago
      No idea, I have no affiliation with them at all. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.

gspr 6y ago

I wish I could be enthusiastic about Nordic, but it's impossible with their extremely non-free SDK license: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/doc/12.3.0/nRF5_Nordic_license.txt https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/d... The first three clauses are fine, essentially BSD-3-clause. Clauses 4 and 5 make it extremely unfriendly to free(-as-in-freedom) projects though. I don't even understand how clause 5 benefits them. Espressif's devices are definitely not open in any sense of the word, but at least their SDK is under a bog-standard Apache license. Same goes for most of the STM SDK.

an_d_rew 6y ago
Nordic’s Middleware is available under a standard BSD 3-clause license. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-Tools/nRF-MDK/Download https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-To... Their middleware and DRIVER library is first rate, also BSD: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICE... They are a first-tier active founding member and supporter of the Zephyr RTOS project by the Linux Foundation. They’ve partnered with Segger for free use of Segger’s embedded studio for Nordic chips. If a fraction of other companies did a fraction of THAT, Open Source would be soooo far ahead!
- gspr 6y ago
  Wow, that's great! Thanks for letting me know, I'll definitely take a closer look! Incidentally, do you know why they choose to keep such a restrictive SDK license when they seem otherwise FOSS-friendly?
  - an_d_rew 6y ago
    No idea, I have no affiliation with them at all. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.