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Nordic Semiconductor Acquires Memfault

(www.nordicsemi.com)
129 points hasheddan | 4 comments | 24 Jun 25 15:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.848s | source
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SOLAR_FIELDS ◴[24 Jun 25 15:39 UTC] No.44367397[source]▶
Nordic makes some good products. When I was doing hardware design for a product that uses a battery my options for power profiling were either not to do it or spend some eye watering amount of money. Then I discovered Nordic makes the PPKII, a cost effective, highly accurate profiler with quite good software. I detect good things in store for the company just based on the quality of stuff they have been putting out.
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monegator ◴[24 Jun 25 15:58 UTC] No.44367601[source]▶
> Nordic makes some good products

and godawful software. the SDK for their NRF52/3/4 is pure madness, i haven't even managed to set up the toolchain, documentation always out of date. They used to have another toolchain for the older parts, but good luck setting it up now.

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1. 5ADBEEF ◴[24 Jun 25 17:34 UTC] No.44368654[source]▶
I don’t think most have this experience. Zephyr is the future.
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2. joezydeco ◴[24 Jun 25 19:55 UTC] No.44370365[source]▶
I've had bad experiences with Zephyr in the past. It's been half-baked and passed around from company to company for ages.

Be Linux or don't be Linux, but don't be halfway between the two.

I have a lot more hope for PX5.

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3. machinehum ◴[24 Jun 25 20:25 UTC] No.44370644[source]▶
I actually disagree.

We have lower power bare metal systems, think AVR/STM stuff (in the 1Mhz to 50Mhz range with 128K or less of RAM) here FreeRTOS, no freeRTOS, custom driver code and some basic application code makes sense. For simple to very complex systems.

Then there's 1Ghz+ stuff with an MMU and 2GB+ RAM. Linux makes sense here.

Companies are now making chips 200Mhz+, 4MB RAM, with no MMU. This is precisely where Zephyr excels, you want a full networking stack? Switch that on. A file system, easy. Driver for some more complex thing? Maybe an SDIO radio? boomboom

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4. vbezhenar ◴[24 Jun 25 20:58 UTC] No.44370979{3}[source]▶
nRF52820 is 256 KB Flash and 32 KB RAM chip. Actually it's around 150 KB flash, because you need space for 120KB softdevice blob (and some RAM too). And it's perfectly enough for many devices. They want developers to use Zephyr for this chip.