Electronics > Microcontrollers

Looking at BLE SOCs, nRF52

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JPortici:
I'm asking here because i know there are some nordic afficionados, we are considering transitioning one product from MCU + BLE Module to an integrated solution, and before diving in i wanted to ask some questions.
To throw a partnumber: nRF52810

First, it seems that the nordic parts are not plagued by dealbraker erratas such as in the ESP32, and that is good. By looking at the errata it seems that the NRF52 ADC is actually usable, good. And the PWM module while being fairly simple seems to be Good Enough™ for analog signal generation. So far so good.

However, i don't understand if there are input capture and output compare modules. That is a hard requirement because we need to acquire and generate some bitbanged signals with microsecond resolution (which is not a problem for a lowly PIC24 at 16MIPS, but with ARM cores, i honestly don't know)
It seems the timer module implements input capture and output compare but i don't know the limitations if i want to do both, and the total amount of channels (2in + 2out should be enough)

Another question: these devices are single core, which means that the CPU is bound to be spending some time managing the BLE stack. Can i assume that it is going to be a hell of a problem for the bitbanged signal generation/acquisition, which has the top priority? (Provided that DMA can't help me)
How much CPU time should the BLE stack take? because if it's frequent but really short i can work around it, if it's going to take a whole 1-10ms continously, that is going to be a major problem.
Ideally i should look for a dual core device - and there are new STM parts i'm also looking at as well

Final question: is there is a preferred IDE/Toolchain? i'm a fan of prepackaged things that "just work", i see that many sources seem to favor VSCode, which i'm not really a fan of

Bonus: How much of a pain would it be to certify the thing?

nctnico:
Which ESP32 are you referring to? For the ESP32-S3 is errata is pretty short and the software ecosystem is pretty good in my book. I'm currently working on an ESP32-S3 project using BLE and I must say I'm quite happy with the software ecosystem Espressif is providing.

JPortici:
I remember reading, just a couple of months ago, much longer errata documents for ESP32 modules of the ones i can find now, with many features i was interested in (mainly CAN and ADC) being effectively useless. (NB: this particular application does NOT require CAN, i was just mentioning the fact)
I believe it was the S3

mayor:
Have you checked TI's CC2652? I think it has what you need, having a Cortex M4F, dedicated Cortex M0 core for radio operations, as well as another core for different types of sensor processing (including comparators, for example).

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: mayor on November 08, 2023, 05:33:20 pm ---Have you checked TI's CC2652? I think it has what you need, having a Cortex M4F, dedicated Cortex M0 core for radio operations, as well as another core for different types of sensor processing (including comparators, for example).

--- End quote ---

In terms of power consumption, these TI chips are very good.

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