🧠 Step Up from Arduino IDE: Embrace the Future with nRF SDK and VSCode!

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Heya GL :slightly_smiling_face: PJ

I came across this thread, looking for something else (I can’t even remember what I was looking for now!) and thought, that looks like a useful project :grinning:

So off I headed and picked up a nice shiny nRF54L15 DK board (from Mouser - free shipping), registered for Nordic’s nRF DevAcademy Fundamentals course and off I go, novice hat in hand. What a great free resource (DevAcademy)! I’ve now (only) just got through Exercise 2.

The reason I am only through to the end of Exercise 2, is I chased my tail for a number of hours with flashing the code to the hardware (in VSCode - nRF Connect for Desktop was easy!), at the end of Exercise2. After spending far too much time with Mr Google and the Nordic DevZone search engine, I finally worked out that I had to load nrfutil.exe (not relevant - but I’m using a VirtualBox Win10 VM on a Win11 Host) via cmd (I used CURB to do this) and then run the nrfutil sub-program: ‘Device’. The reason I bring this up is - did I miss something obvious? The fundamentals course is incredibly detailed, yet it mentioned the need for nrfutil only in passing, at the volume of a whisper and with a lisp! Is this just somehow known by everybody?

One other question - did you sign up for DevZone? If so, how long did it take for Nordic to approve your application? I received two rapid-fire emails back with a login and temp password, but using these just sent back a boilerplate: “Your account is not yet approved.” Its been nearly a week now since I signed up.

Apart from these two grumbles, what a great resource. Also, again as you’ve already pointed out, what a bargain to have a nRF54 board with a J-Link debugger chip (admittedly the EM version - but still blinkin handy) for the price of a meal for the family at McD’s :grin:

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