Nordic Semiconductor: Development Kit for Bluetooth Low Energy BLE nRF51-DK

The nRF51 DK is a low-cost, versatile single-board development kit for Bluetooth® low energy, ANT and 2.4GHz proprietary applications using the nRF51 Series SoC. This kit supports development for both nRF51822, nRF51824 and nRF51422 SoCs.

The kit is hardware compatible with the Arduino Uno Revision 3 standard, making it possible to use 3rd-party shields that are compatible to this standard with the kit.

It supports the standard Nordic Software Development Tool-chain using Keil, IAR and GCC,there is also support for the ARM mbed tool-chain for rapid prototyping and development using mbed’s cloud-based IDE and tool-chain with an extensive range of open-source software libraries. Program/Debug options on the kit are Segger J-Link OB for standard tool-chain and CMSIS-DAP for mbed. The kit gives access to all I/O and interfaces via connectors and has 4 LEDs and 4 buttons which are user-programmable.

In addition to standard nRF51 Series development, the development kit can be used as a useful and highly cost-effective Bluetooth low energy packet sniffer using Nordic nRF Sniffer software allowing detailed data related to Bluetooth low energy communication to be captured and analyzed. Using the Master Emulator firmware and the Master Control Panel Software it enables setting up of a peer device that you can use to test the connection of your application.

Software Support

Nordic Semiconductor protocol stacks are known as SoftDevices. SoftDevices are pre-compiled, pre-linked binary files. SoftDevices can be programmed in nRF51 series SoCs and are downloadable from the Nordic web.The nRF51 DK supports all Nordic SoftDevices (click on the icons below for details). The nRF51 DK supports the nRF51 SDK which provides extensive software support and complete examples for both Bluetooth low energy, ANT and 2.4GHz proprietary applications.