from the looks and first impressions of the mKit board ,I think that there's a BIG(sort of a LQFP pack..) ATmel arm chip on board!? I'm not able to understand is that Atmel uC just used to program the nrF51822 or uses the SOCs bluetooth perpherals?

I think most likely that other BIG uC is there for just programming the nrF51822!

Please share your thoughts as to what you folks know? or expect this board to sport.

FYI, that ATMEL is used as well known Segger JLINK on board. From that point of view, nordic should ask help from mBed, since SWD debugger could be much smaller like K20 (QFN32), LPC11U35 (QFN32), STM32F103 (QFP48).

Usually I use a local board called nRF58122 SoC gen2, which only use SWD for debugging.

nordic also lacks of RF sniffer like TI CC254X does. The support team asks me to use CC254X to sniffer BLE packet for nRF58122.

Nordic does have a sniffer. Search nRF sniffer.

Nishant: The Atmel chip acts solely as a CMSIS-DAP enabled debugger (not as a J-Link, though Nordic uses the same chip to provide a J-Link debugger on their non-mbed dev kits). The reason they chose the Atmel chip is because it was already being used on their existing dev kits and so was an easy choice for them to simply provide new firmware based on known HW.

Kai: Concerning the sniffer, and as Vincent mentioned, Nordic actually has a very good one available that pushes data directly into Wireshark, which is much better than the stand-alone TI tool in my opinion (though perhaps I'm just more familiar with Wireshark).

Not sure if Nordic would like to release this new firmware.

Hi Vincent,

You can purchase the nRF51822-EK, though, just for the sniffer since it's such a useful tool. I have the TI one as well, but I prefer piping data directly into wireshark. The nRF51822-EK costs more than the TI sniffer, but Wireshark is a much more powerful tool in my opinion.

Kevin: OKay so just to have another available CMSIS - DAP debugger , is this 11u24 based workout fine!? > http://mbed.org/users/yihui/notebook/nrf51822-with-pyocd-and-arch/?c=10888

also: The nRESET & SWDIO are the same pin#23 on the nrf51822! but above you should that nRESET and SWDIO need to be connected individually! ,so How I'm supposed to connect in such a case?

Does this board have any PWM outputs?

Yes it has PWM outputs.

Please which pins are PWM outputs? That was the essence of the question. I can't see from the datasheet nor platform pinout in the environment.

Thanks.

You can make any pin you want a PWM, which is one of the advantages of the nRF51822. You might find this helpful: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/index.php/is-there-an-example-code-for-using-pwm-on-the-nrf51822-with-a-softdevice#reply-3516

The nRF51822 uses something called tasks and events to, amongst other things, generate the PWM output. It's a bit confusing at first, but hopefully the example code above will help you get started. As mentioned, you can specify any pin you want for the PWM output.

The example above is useful but quite messy just to use a PWMOut pin? Is there a an mBed friendly abstraction similar to:

PWMOut my_pwm_pin(p23);

for example?

Thanks!

If you are using the nRF51822-mKIT with mbed, this will work just as expected:

PwmOut my_pwm_pin(p23);

According to this claims, I've purchased nRF51822-EK and after two weeks of fiddling with the Sniffer and endless conversation with Nordic's support, I've just realized, that nRF51822 is not general purpose BLE sniffer, it can only sniff advertising packets. You'll never see scan requests/scan responses on advertising channels for example. I'm quite surprised and going to purchase CC2540 USB which seems like more general purpose BLE sniffer then nRF518222.

To clarify the poster above, the EK based sniffer will be able to sniff a single slave device and report all packets about it, advertisements, scan requests, scan responses, connection requests and data in a connection. However this will be done only for a single device so you can sniff only a single device.

The user guide mentions this In section 3 "From this list, you can choose one particular device to sniff, and by that change the mode of the sniffer."

I have attached a screen capture with the sniffer capturing scan requests and scan responses /media/uploads/daviddedwin/nrf51_sniffer_video_select_device.mp4