Like if you have an nRF52840: Nordic USB dongle, Arduino Nano 33 BLE, Adafruit, Sparkfun, April, Makerdairy, Fanstel, Particle or any other

[hpssjellis]

@WhiteHare

UPDATE: Looks as though mBed may have just fairly recently gotten some kind of customize-able bootloading working on the nRF52840: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-bootloader , though it would greatly help if in addition there were some documented examples of exactly how to do it.

Thanks @WhiteHare for the in depth information. Also here’s a quote of yours from Anyone have experience changing nrf52840 bootloaders?

@WhiteHare

You can certainly flash them with each others bootloaders, but I don’t see how it would make your life even a little bit easier. Since the hardware would be different, more than likely it would be the exact opposite of making your life easier.

I am kind of moving away from the other boards and will probably just stick to the Arduino Nano 33 IoT (BLE4.2 and Wifi) and Nano 33 BLE Sense (BLE5.0 and multiple sensors). As you have mentioned, I do just want to make my life easier. I should probably just toss away my class set of 15 Particle Xenons (BLE) and 15 Particle Argons (BLE and Wifi).

As far as over-the-air updates, that is not my major concern, the Wifi at my school is less than perfect (I have been teaching Robotics using the Particle Photon for 3 years and OTA is a real pain in a busy Wifi school) . The Arduino IDE and/or Visual Studio with PlatformIO and a usb cable work great for me. (Visual Studio even installs easily on locked down school computers so that is a bonus).

I will still tinker with the nRF52840 boards, but probably just to figure out which pins work and which don’t.