The nRF5 SDK supports the current Nordic Semiconductor development board. You can also enable support for another board by selecting a specific supported Nordic Semiconductor board or by defining a custom board. In this way, you can run the SDK examples on any target board.
By default, the SDK project files must be used with specific Nordic Semiconductor boards, usually the most current board. However, the SDK provides support for other boards as well.
The following boards are supported:
| Board | #define |
|---|---|
| nRF6310 (part of nRFgo Starter Kit) | BOARD_NRF6310 |
| PCA10000 (nRF51822 USB dongle) | BOARD_PCA10000 |
| PCA10001 (part of nRF51822 Evaluation Kit) | BOARD_PCA10001 |
| PCA10002 (nRF51422 USB dongle) | BOARD_PCA10002 |
| PCA10003 (part of nRF51422 Evaluation Kit, BLE + ANT) | BOARD_PCA10003 |
| PCA10028 (part of nRF51422 Evaluation Kit, Arduino form factor) | BOARD_PCA10028 |
| PCA10031 (nRF51422 USB dongle) | BOARD_PCA10031 |
| PCA10036 (part of nRF52 Preview Development Kit) | BOARD_PCA10036 |
| PCA10040 (part of nRF52 Development Kit) | BOARD_PCA10040 |
| PCA20006 (nRF51822 Beacon board) | BOARD_PCA20006 |
| WT51822 (Wavetek shield) | BOARD_WT51822 |
| Custom board (definition in custom_board.h) | BOARD_CUSTOM |
To enable support for an older Nordic Semiconductor board or a custom board, you must include a define statement for the board that you want to use before you compile the code.
According to the define statement, the suitable board support file is selected. The board support file defines the peripherals, thus the location of LEDs and buttons, for the selected platform. The header files for supported boards are located in the directory examples\bsp. The actual selection of the file according to the define statement is done in boards.h.
Depending on the device on the legacy board, you might need to change the memory layout. For example, all nRF51 examples assume that you are using the 32 kB variant of nRF51, so if you are using a variant with 16 kB RAM, you must decrease the size of IRAM1 by 16 kB (0x4000 in hex). In Keil, click Project > Options for Target '...' and modify the values for "Read/Write Memory Area". For GCC, change the linked *.ld file in the Makefile.
To add support for a custom board, you must create a custom board support file with the name custom_board.h. This file must be located in a directory in the Include path. You can then select to use the custom board by adding the define statement #define BOARD_CUSTOM.
The easiest way to create the custom_board.h file is to start with an existing platform definition file and adapt it to your needs.
A platform example definition looks as follows: