Hello!
I am in the initial stages of setting up my platformio environment to develop an ANT application for the nrf51. I have some code that I participated working on a long time ago using the Keil environment that I would like to bring up, but I have forgotten most of how it works and I remember that it was kind of a pain, so I am excited that platformio seems to support this platform now. There seems to be quite a bit of support for bluetooth applications, but I am having a hard time finding much beginner-friendly info on ANT.
My plan is to learn how this all works by setting up platformio with some example code to get the toolchain all straightened out, and then attempt to port my old code that was developed under Keil.
I plan to start by getting everything running using an nrf51 dongle (has a built in segger), and then move development to a board which has an off the shelf nrf51 module, programmed with an external segger.
So far, I have got platformio running on vscode, and added the nordic nrf51 platform to it. I have made an empty pio project for the nrf51 dongle, and it compiles successfully.
Now, I need to figure out how to add an ANT softdevice. From what I have read in the bluetooth examples included with this platform, I see that platformio will add the desired softdevice to the binary and flash it if the proper build_flags are set. However, I’m having a hard time finding the list of acceptable build_flags.
Also, it seems that there are no examples for ANT included with the nrf51 platformio. So, perhaps it could be a useful exercise to port one of the ANT examples that come with the nrf5 SDK.
Here are my questions:
-Where can I find the list of acceptable build_flags to correctly include the softdevice in my platformio.ini?
-Can anybody recommend an example application from the nordic SDK that would be a good candidate for porting to platformio as a learning exercise?
-Is this whole thing maybe not a good idea for platformio since none of the ant examples from Nordic use ardunio or mbed framework?
-Any other resources that would be helpful?
Thank you! I’ve had a great time using platformio/vscode for other embedded development, and would really like to be able to use it for this project too.